


Car Troubles

by Chokopoppo



Series: Who Looks for Love Through the Eye of a Needle [3]
Category: Johnny the Homicidal Maniac
Genre: Edgar Vargas/Jimmy "Mmy"/Johnny "Nny" C. (mentioned), Gen, Hospitals, Insanity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-27
Updated: 2018-05-17
Packaged: 2019-04-28 10:39:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 22,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14447535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chokopoppo/pseuds/Chokopoppo
Summary: It's a terribly small world.





	1. An angel in a box beneath your bed

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has been sitting unfinished in my to-do list for so long, that it was originally a second chapter for [Oberon and Titania.](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12247431) It's since been transformed into another part of Dez's wonderful Who Looks For Love Through The Eye Of A Needle series, and I couldn't be happier. Mostly because it put the fire under my ass to get it done, and given that this has been in the garage since December, that's probably exactly what I needed.
> 
> Anyway, enjoy! Or don't. I am not a beggar.

Jimmy gets the call at four in the morning.

Well, more specifically, Edgar picks up the phone, since Jimmy’s natural response to any noise before 8 AM is to kick him under the blankets and tell him to turn the alarm off. But after some confused grumbling, he shakes the younger man awake, shoves the cordless into his unresisting hands, and crawls back under the covers. Jimmy accepts it with some reluctance and a lot of swearing.

_“Is this James Euridge?”_

“Who the fuck’s asking?”

 _“Saint Joseph Mercy Hospital in Nebraska,”_ the woman on the line says, and _that_ gets his attention, _“this number was listed as an emergency contact by a recent patient in the ER. Are you or do you know the whereabouts of - “_

“Okay, jesus, yeah,” he cuts her off, “that’s me. Fuck, fine. What happened, who - I mean, who would have _me_ as their emergency anything, fuck - “

 _“If it helps, you weren’t her first choice,”_ she says, like that’s fucking soothing or whatever, _“but you’re the only one we’ve gotten any response from. Do you know a Theresa Reeds? Her information lists you as her brother.”_

“Tess?”

He looks down as the woman on the line explains the situation, heart clenching in his chest like a fist is trying to burst it. Next to him, Edgar gives up on pretending to be asleep and sits up, touches his shoulder gently. Fear keeps him from leaning into the touch.

Something-something car crash, something-something delusional, wandering aimlessly, something or other about medical bills, can’t be left alone, psychological trauma. He keeps listening to words that go in one ear and out the other. Distantly, he catches worried glances and whispered questions he can’t manage any answers to. A warm hand on his neck he flinches off instinctively.

When he hangs up, it takes too long to form a sentence of any kind.

“What?” Edgar asks. Jimmy shakes his head.

“We need to go to Nebraska tomorrow,” he says after a moment, “my sister got hit by a car. There’s no one there to help her.”

Edgar looks like he’s going to ask a question, but thinks better of it. “Okay,” he says. “Are you okay?”

“I don’t know.” He stops - Edgar’s watching him sympathetically, borderline confused and maybe about to ask another question. He rests his head on his shoulder. “Let’s talk about this tomorrow. Get some sleep.”

Neither one of them sleeps. Jimmy can hear Edgar’s uneven breathing, feel him trying to somehow ooze sympathy out of his skin like a sponge, wringing himself out to cool Jimmy’s fevered skin. Jimmy just stares at the ceiling fan and thinks about green grass and blue skies and feet pounding on packed dirt like asphalt.

They both give up around eight. Edgar scurries around the apartment, checking and double-checking his toiletries kit for pills Jimmy didn’t know he took and hurriedly folding a few shirts to meaningfully cover up any unmentionables in the duffle bag, phone tucked under his ear as he hashes out shifts to cover and how long they’ll be gone. Jimmy sits anxiously on the couch. He’s got exactly one appropriate change of clothes, and it’s already stuffed in his backpack from last night. Lucky he did the laundry last weekend - he can make the jeans last at least a month as long as he doesn’t spill anything on them, and he’s good at cleaning tee shirts in the sink.

“What are we gonna do about Johnny?” Jimmy asks the next time Edgar moves past him, and he pauses, tips his head slightly. “We can’t just leave him here.”

“I’m not sure Johnny’s really interested in being in a car for that long.” Edgar chews his lip thoughtfully. “Do you think he can drive? It’d be helpful to have someone else who could take the wheel for a while, do it in shifts, but I’m not sure it’d be safe, given his depth perception…” he trails off, glances into the living room. “Is he up?”

“He’s not in. I think I heard him take off early this morning, like six or something.”

“Maybe he went down to the soup kitchen. I should stop by there anyway, I’ll probably have to close up shop for a few days. I don’t think there’s anyone who could cover it.”

“You could let Johnny run it for a while.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Fair.” Jimmy looks down at his bag. “It’s a long way,” he says after a minute, “I can pay for gas, I know this is my shit - “

“We’re not talking about money, this is an emergency,” Edgar interrupts, “we’re just going to find out what’s going on and do what we can. Alright?”

Jimmy bites his cheek until he tastes blood. “Alright,” he says after a minute.

“Good,” Edgar says. “Let’s go get Johnny.”

~~

Surprisingly, things go off without a hitch - as per usual, Jimmy guesses, when Edgar’s dealing with their resident space case instead of him. Johnny’s always willing to do anything, if Edgar’s the one who asks for it, so it figures he’d be willing to sit in the back of the car, cursing and fumbling with a pack of shitty crayons that he refuses to reveal the origins of for, like, twenty hours straight. Eventually, he puts his headphones on and starts humming, in an agitated sort of way, along with some classical piece Jimmy’s never heard of and probably wouldn’t like.

Once they hit the highway, Edgar turns the radio on, and they listen to some british dude ramble on about some city in some country in the middle east that Jimmy’s never heard of. Instead of complaining (which he normally does, and which suits him fine most days, and, like, is a good way to show he’s paying attention to what he’s listening to, kind of, and Edgar usually sighs and says _’at least you care’_ , which feels nice maybe), he puts his feet up on the dash and stares out his window.

“I didn’t know you had a sister,” Edgar says eventually, when the british dude finishes talking about refugees and starts talking about some heat wave that’s killing crops in another country Jimmy couldn’t pronounce if you showed it to him on paper. He reaches for the volume knob like he’s going to turn it down, then thinks better of it.

“Yeah, well.” Jimmy shifts, glances behind them towards Johnny, who’s stretched out over the backseat, lying on his back and staring resolutely at the car’s upholstery above him. “She’s my half-sister, I guess. We’re barely siblings. Anyway, she’s a lot older than me.”

“Oh,” Edgar says. “Were you two ever close?”

Jimmy thinks about hot summer days spent in a beat-up ’68 Pontiac, half-rust and old even when some waitressing job had scraped the cash together to buy it, windows rolled down for an artificial breeze along back roads thick with gravel and the stink of dead grass. “Dunno,” he says, “I guess when I was little, I thought she was cool - she was around and she had a car, which was pretty much all it took back then. Haven’t seen her much since, though.”

The radio switches to a woman translating some interviewee’s words over the original recording, and Edgar looks at him sideways, but doesn’t pry. They sit in the false silence, watching cars pass one another around them.

Had he and Tess ever been close? Jimmy isn’t really sure. Objectively, they’d only ever lived in a house together for one summer, just a couple of months. He remembers her as being younger than his mom, but still definitely an adult. Like a cool, young adult, probably in her mid-twenties and spending her time in a bar like in Cheers or something cool and mature. In retrospect, she couldn’t have been out of high school. But she’d been well-travelled (her dad was military or something, which Jimmy couldn’t say he was a fan of, but was at least a step-up from the deadbeat he’d gotten anchored to his neck by bullshit genetics), and she could speak German, and she knew how to ride horses…and she wore all black, even when you could cook an egg on the sidewalk. And that had been cool, too, probably cooler than anything else she could do.

She’d had a bunch of books about Egypt and the study of mummies and stuff, and she said things like “wanna hear something _really_ gross?” right before reading passages of them out loud, or explaining how they used to use hooks to pull people’s brains out of their noses while his jaw had dropped lower and his eyes had widened in fascinated disgust. Maybe she’d just understood instinctively how much he needed someone to enjoy his company, or at least pretend to. In retrospect, he’d probably had a bit of a hero-worship thing for her, which seems like a big deal until he remembers that all she really had to do to get stars in his eyes was be older and show him, like, basic human courtesy.

“Last time I saw her was at one of these…like, our mom got into these weird family reunion moods or something,” he says, as Edgar’s changing lanes to take an exit onto a different highway, “like, she wanted to have this, like, family community or something. My mom, that is. The whole thing was just bullshit, ‘cause no one I’m related to considers anyone else I’m related to family, but she’d throw these big parties and people’d come, ‘cause free food is free food, right?”

Edgar pauses, then nods.

“I guess I was…I dunno, fourteen or fifteen or something,” he continues on, “I was still kinda _that kid,_ you know? I was always the youngest one at these things, and I would get bored ‘cause no one was paying attention to me, and sometimes I’d start shit or the old lady would start shit, whatever, but we’d get into it a lot and it always ended bad. Fucking hated being stuck there, but I didn’t have a car or anything, I couldn’t bolt. Fuck if I didn’t want to.” _Fuck if I didn’t try,_ he almost says, but something about that is too personal, not something to be shared in a car in broad daylight, both of them squinting against the light reflecting against the glass.

“So, just kinda to quiet everything down, probably, Tess would let me tag along to whatever she was doing downtown. Just shopping or whatever, boring shit, but it got us out of the house. And I would do it just to hang out with her, ‘cause I was a dumb kid and I pretty much clung to anyone who wouldn’t scrape me off - which wasn’t many by high school, by the way, I was burning bridges like it was on my career path - and we both liked the same kind of shit. She listened to Nine Inch Nails, that kind of thing.” He stares down at his boots halfheartedly. “After that, she just disappeared off the face of the earth. No one knew what happened to her, and no one really cared. Me, I figured she wised up and got out of there.”

Edgar’s quiet for a moment, like he’s waiting for more, but Jimmy has officially run out of things to say on that topic. He doesn’t dwell on lost relationships much, not when he could be talking about movies he saw on rerun or the best places to nick free samples when money comes up short. There’s no answers there, no way to come out on top.

“She sounds nice,” Edgar says, and Jimmy shrugs.

“I guess.”

They stop at a rest station and swap drivers while Johnny pesters the local wildlife and has to be gently persuaded back into the car, with the caveat that he gets to pick a cassette from Edgar’s meager selection and sit in the front for a few hours. Edgar willingly relinquishes the seat, something about needing a nap anyway, and curls up in the back. Jimmy watches via the rearview mirror as he wraps various seat belts around himself, as though, in the case of a car crash, being gently looped to the seat is going to make a ton of difference. He resolves to drive carefully.

“Put your seatbelt on,” Jimmy says, less because he really gives a shit about seatbelt safety and more because if Edgar wakes up and realizes Johnny’s crouching on the seat with no protection whatsoever, he’s going to throw a fit about somebody getting launched through the windshield or something. Johnny scowls at him.

“I can’t sit this way with a seatbelt on,” he says sourly, “I need to bend my knees more. It’s good for the legs.”

“Okay, whatever,” Jimmy says, shrugging. “Can you drive?”

Johnny stares at him. “I used to have a car,” he says at last, “before my interim in the pit of the beast. I think she stole it, harvested it for parts. Maybe I can.” He selects a tape apparently at random and reaches over to fiddle with the radio. Jimmy hears a violin and stifles a groan.

“We might have you in the rotation for driving, then. It’s like twenty hours to Nebraska. What are we _listening_ to?”

Johnny shrugs. “It’s the soundtrack to _Amadeus,_ ” he says, as if Edgar owns that (he definitely doesn’t, by the way, Jimmy has been through that case about seven million times and all he ever finds is Queen and Blue Swede, it’s enough to make a man despair), “it starts with Mozart’s _Allegro con brio_. Brilliance in motion.”

“I saw ads for that,” Jimmy says, “that movie’s old though, isn’t it? It was about Mozart or something, and it ends pretty badly, I think. I dunno, I wasn’t old enough to go see it when it was playing and it’s really not - do we _have_ to listen to this?”

There’s a pause. “Yes,” Johnny says emphatically, and reaches for the volume knob to turn it up. Jimmy curses and gets on the highway.

~~

On rotation, it doesn’t seem right to stop at a hotel, so Jimmy’s taking his turn to doze in the back under the flickering streetlights at five in the morning when they pass into the city. The streets are almost completely bare, and they rumble uncertainly like dirt and gravel under the car’s tires. That’s at least half the reason Jimmy pulls himself up into a sitting position.

“We here?”

“Looks like it,” Edgar says, and glances back at him in the rearview mirror. “You okay?”

Jimmy grunts. “Spent the night sleeping in a moving car,” he grumbles, “other than that, I could go for a fucking tap dance down Main Street.”

“Technically, we _all_ spent the night sleeping in a moving car.” He throws a cursory glance towards the passenger seat, where Johnny is curled up, head tucked between his knees like a long-necked bird, fully unconscious. It looks hideously uncomfortable. He’s wheezing slightly, which is about as close to snoring as that guy gets. “Are you ready? Do you need more time?”

“I need to get the fuck out of this car,” Jimmy replies, eyes fixed on the looming, illuminated building ahead of them. It’s all white concrete and grey brick, and LED strips going around ledges at the top of structures, hooked together and sprawling across an enormous campus. It hardly looks real, not real like a hospital’s supposed to look real, anyway. More like a movie theater or a shopping mall, clean and brightly lit and pale. Somehow, the size makes it feel tighter, claustrophobic, like he’s choking on it. As they pull into a spot in the virtually deserted parking lot, he swallows hard and bursts out through the door, makes a big show of stretching. It never does any good to linger on a threshold - best to just get on with it.

Hospitals in TV shows and stuff are always so pristine and sterile, and, like, kind of blue-tinted? He kind of doubts real hospitals are like that, anyway, but he’s still kind of shocked by how dingy the waiting room is. Edgar goes to talk with the woman at the front desk while Jimmy keeps an eye on Johnny, watching the room for trouble, but all’s quiet on the home front - of the five people in the waiting room, two are asleep, two are watching a video on a phone with dulled interest, and none of them provides a threat. They’re dulled to the entrance of fresh faces, ground down to a soft exterior by the pace that kills. Edgar’s giving him this soft, pitiful look, which is probably supposed to be comforting, but it’s just making him feel nervous.

He shouldn’t care about this. That’s what he keeps coming back to - he shouldn’t care about this. It’s been years - years -

“Jimmy,” says Edgar, and Jimmy kind of startles, except not really because Edgar has the softest tone of voice and currently sounds like he’s trying to soothe a horse that just bucked its rider and needs to be tamed by a thirteen year old girl in one of those horse books that Jimmy never read but saw at every Scholastic book fair back when school used to care if its students read or not, and maybe Edgar is the protagonist? Like, the wild horse girl who everyone thinks is crazy for choosing to ride Appleblossom, the Wildest and Fairest of the horses at Brooke County Pond And Stables, but then he dons a boy’s pants and sneaks into the stables overnight to - uh - this metaphor is getting away from him. “You ready to go? The nurse is going to take you back.”

He blinks. “Aren’t you coming?”

“It’s way past visiting hours, and I’m not related,” Edgar explains, “technically, they weren’t going to let any of us in, but since you’re her brother-“

“Half-brother.”

“Since you’re her brother,” Edgar repeats firmly, “they’re going to let you go in and see her. She’ll probably be asleep, but I thought it might put your mind at ease if you saw that she was okay.”

“She’s not _that_ okay, she’s in the hospital,” he grouses, “anyway, since when does my mind need to be- to- to get eased up? I’m fine.”

Edgar gives him a look. “You haven’t been settled since we got the call and you know it. I know it’s…I know hospitals can be intimidating, but I promise, you won’t be as wound up if you just see her.”

Something about the way Edgar’s talking reminds Jimmy that this must be…kinda personal. From what he’s gathered, Edgar spent most of his young adulthood in and out of hospitals, dealing with paperwork and nurses and weird relatives muscling in on his spot, probably. Does Edgar have any weird relatives? Why doesn’t he know if Edgar has any weird relatives or not? “Okay,” Jimmy concedes, “I’ll go see her. Just point me in the right direction already.”

Edgar doesn’t know where to point him, but he does know where to find a nurse, and the nurse knows where to go, which is almost the same thing. She leads him through a series of doors and hallways, twisting and turning and absolutely fucking his sense of spacial awareness over before she guides him to a room closed off from the rest of the floor.

“She’s just through there,” she says, “when you’re done, just go back the way you came.”

“Um,” Jimmy says, but she’s already striding purposefully away. Is she allowed to do that? What if he was a murderer or something, running through the halls, killing indiscriminately? Not that that nurse could’ve stopped him, if he _did_ want to murder someone. Maybe her complete inability to fight him off makes this okay. “Thanks. I guess.”

It’s fuck-off-o’clock in the morning, but even in the tiny private room, the LED lights are blasting at the ultimate brightness imaginable as the door clicks shut behind him. The whole room is washed out in shades of white and blue. Now _this_ looks like a TV hospital.

Amidst all the pale blankets and pillows and scrubs, the shock of black hair catches his eye. Tess is asleep, head twisted slightly towards her own shoulder, plugged in to a small army of vitals monitors and breathing unevenly. Jimmy’s throat feels very dry. When he was little, Tess was always _thin,_ but she was thin in an Adult Vegetarian, Fashionably Attractive sort of way. She’s thin now, rail thin, victim thin. Her knuckles protrude at sharp, ugly angles in her hands, her collarbones stab up against her skin.

If the call he got was right, Tess got hit by a car a couple weeks ago, got super fucked up. But he doesn’t see any stitching or scars. Maybe it’s all under her hospital gown?

“Uh,” he says quietly, “hey. It’s, uh, it’s me. And, um…I’m here. Uh. It’s been a while.”

Tess doesn’t respond. Probably because she’s asleep.

“Okay, uh, fair. Fair point. Um, I don’t…really know what I’m supposed to do here, except see that you’re not dead, so…you’re not dead, and, uh, I’m just going to…go,” Jimmy says, and moves to turn - 

There’s a noise from the bed, and his head whips back. It’s not a human sound, not a groan or a sigh, it’s like - something with small paws skittering on linoleum, something moving where it shouldn’t be. Is there an animal in here? Jesus, could Tess have _found_ a worse place to be hospitalized?

If it’s an animal, he should - try to grab it, or something. The skittering noise has stopped, but it was right behind the headboard of her bed. He swallows, takes a hesitant step towards it. This is fine. He’s the one who caught the cat, he can catch a - a rabid squirrel or something, he’s got fast hands. He inches forwards and peers around the back of the bed. Weird. He can’t _see_ anything, but the sound definitely came from here…

There’s a knock from the door, but when Jimmy turns his head to see who it is, he sees it hanging wide open, exposing the dark hallways beyond. There’s no one in the doorway.

Behind the open door, against the wall, he can just make out the dark shape of a person.

Jimmy squints uncertainly at it. He can’t see any details, but it’s kind of the same height as Nny. He really _should_ be able to see him, this room is so brightly lit - but it seems dimmer than before, somehow, like the lights are as strong as ever but they’re illuminating bare inches from their plastic tubing. Maybe they lower the lights at night? Why was it so bright in here in the first place? Fucking weird.

“Nny,” he says, and the shape behind the door startles and shifts, “dude, come out from there. Did you follow me?”

The shadow retreats further behind the door, and Jimmy rolls his eyes, steps forward to grab the handle. “I can _see_ you,” he grumbles, and pulls the door forward, away from the wall - 

There’s no one there.

The shadow evaporates as soon as the door moves away from the light source, like it was a natural shade - his eyebrows furrow. But he _saw_ it moving around, he was so _sure_ it was a person - and when he puts the door back where it was before, it’s not the same shadow at all.

He shakes his head and goes to close the door. He’s probably just seeing things and letting his imagination - fuck, do whatever, apparently. He _is_ running on about four hours of backseat car napping, after all. His brain isn’t all together.

“How did you see me?” Says Nny’s voice, from beyond the doorway. Jimmy actually _jumps._

“What the fuck,” he gasps, “don’t do that, what the fuck - “

“Don’t do what?” Nny’s head pops out from around the side of the door, frowning expectantly. “You _specifically asked me_ to come out. I didn’t realize you could see me - I was hiding in the darkness, leaping from shadow to shadow in your wake.”

“You followed us?” As Nny drips in, Jimmy closes the door behind him. His heartbeat is slowing back down to where it’s supposed to be - something about knowing Nny had a pair of eyes on his back this whole time lifts a weight off his shoulders. “But wait, I thought you were going to stay with Edgar in the waiting room. Why the change of heart?”

“Edgar’s talking to a doctor about paperwork,” Nny says, “why hang off his shoulder like a redundancy, haunting his presence and slowing his progress? Should I be a tripwire over the threshold of his freedom? Besides,” he says, gazing benignly up into Jimmy’s face, “you shouldn’t do this alone.”

No matter how long he lives in that apartment with Johnny, no matter how often he wakes up in the night and finds the curve of his back awake and coiled against them, something in Jimmy’s chest always forgets that Nny loves him back until he says shit like _that._ He lets out an involuntary sigh of air. “Thanks,” he says after a moment, throat tight.

Nny just shrugs. “Hospitals are foul,” he says, eyes wandering across the room, “nothing but vaulting walls, temples to the acrid stench of sickness. A desperate plea to stave off the inevitability of suffering, places of worship to dark and ugly creators lurking in the wretched intestinal tract of the damned.”

And the tightness is gone. “Uh,” Jimmy says, “ _thhhanks,_ Nny.”

Nny looks as though he’s about to continue on with his bit on, uh, the human experience and intestines and stuff, but there’s a soft, entirely human noise from the bed, and he stops himself in his tracks. Jimmy’s head snaps back to see his half-sister lift her head off her pillow, eyes fluttering and squinting warily in the light.

“Tess?” Jimmy says cautiously, just as Johnny, standing at his shoulder, whispers “ _Tess,_ ” with an unexpected reverence.

“Uh,” Jimmy says.

“You’re _alive,_ ” Nny says, and sweeps past him to the side of her bed, “are you well?”

“Uh,” Jimmy says.

Tess blinks hazily up at the both of them, eyes flickering from one to the other as if trying to do a complex math problem with too many variables. “Hey,” she says. Her voice sounds husky with misuse and sleep, lower than Jimmy remembers it being, stolidly alto. “Weren’t you more fucked up last time?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Nny says, nodding, “it’s been so long. How have you been?”

“Homeless and insane.”

“Oh, me too!”

“ _Uh,_ ” Jimmy says. Tess glances up at him. She squints.

“When’d you - hey, kid,” she says, “I remember you being shorter. Weren’t you shorter?”

“What’s happening,” Jimmy says.

Tess hums. “You’re all tall now,” she says distantly, and waves a hand in the air, like she’s stretching to touch him, or marking out how tall he used to be when he was like fifteen (read: not fucking tall. Junior year is when that growth spurt hit him like a bitch) or something. “When’d you get tall?”

Nny hums and nods. “The passage of time is a mystery to all of us,” he says sagely, “who knows what one second is to the next? Who can guess the intimacies of - “

“Is that my coat?” She interrupts, looking back at him. He pauses and glances down.

“So it would seem,” he says, lips pursed. “Er, in my defense, I thought you were dead for sure, and it’s a very nice jacket. You have good taste.”

“Okay, so that’s not…a _great_ defense,” Tess says, after a pause, “but this is - this is a fun combo. Don’t think I’ve ever seen the two of you together before. Sort of out of the box. These drugs are something else.”

Thoughtlessly, her fingers tangle in something around her neck, and Jimmy’s eyes catch on the glint of something gold. Is that a necklace? Is she allowed to have that? He kind of thought you weren’t supposed to have jewelry in hospitals. The last time he had surgery - which, okay, was when he was like seventeen and they were getting his wisdom teeth out, so alright, that was a while ago but _still_ \- he couldn’t even wear earrings or anything. Didn’t jewelry collect germs or something?

As he watches, her hands find the pendant at the end, buried somewhere in the tangle of blankets, and as she lifts it to her chest, the shock jars him. It’s the ankh.

“I wish I could be better company,” she says, thumbs rubbing the stem thoughtfully, “but I’m not sure how long I can even stay conscious. Ha, like that was ever a problem before. I’ve slept more in this hospital than all the rest of this month. Hard to get kip when your dreams are eating you alive. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

“Of course you will,” Nny says, “we’re here to pick you up. Right? Isn’t that why we came?”

Jimmy shakes off the miserable grinding noise in his head. “Yeah, right,” he says, “Edgar’s getting the information now, but yeah, we’re here to, uh…take care of you, I guess?”

“Edgar?” Tess’ face twists up. “I don’t know anyone named Edgar.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says, “he’s my - uh - he came with us. He helped drive out here. I’ll introduce you tomorrow. You’ll like him.”

She squints at him. “But that’s not - but I don’t - “ she breaks off, squinting blearily against the drug-induced sleep rushing her like a bull. “But if _I_ don’t know - are you - “ her eyes flick from Jimmy to Johnny and back. “Are you real?”

“Oh,” Nny says, “oh no.”

If Tess has anything else to say, they don’t hear it. Her head dips sideways into her pillow, and her breathing starts to even out. When Jimmy looks across the bed at Nny, he finds him staring down at her, the picture of piteous consternation, hands wringing and jaw working.

“Hey,” he says quietly, “we should get out of here, Nny. Come on.”

“Why didn’t I do more?” Nny mumbles. “Why didn’t I do it sooner?”

With some coaxing and a touch to the elbow that almost loses Jimmy his hand, he manages to guide Nny out of the room. Once they’re back in the dark hallways, he bucks up a bit - which is good, because Jimmy has no idea how to get back to the waiting room from here. Nny’s spacial awareness is a lot better than his, apparently, since he remembers the whole way back and Jimmy only kind of remembers that they passed by a vending machine at one point. He buys a thing of Rolos for Edgar and waits for a patented Nny monologue to sprout up as they make their way back, but apparently there isn’t one forthcoming. He kind of wishes there was. It’d make him feel better. Like he was standing on solid ground.

Edgar’s sitting in the waiting room, a clipboard against one knee and a veritable tower of paper on the chair next to him. He accepts the candy gratefully, nods as Johnny announces he’s going for a walk, and makes room for Jimmy in the seat on his left. “You alright?” He asks. Jimmy shrugs.

“Here, give me something, I’ll help.”

“It’s fine,” Edgar says, “I’ve done this sort of thing before, it doesn’t take as long as you’d think. You should get some sleep.”

Normally, Jimmy would protest this kind of statement, but his shoulders are worn loose in their sockets, and the anxious thoughts running in circles around his brain could really stand to give him a fucking break right now, honestly. He shifts in his chair and rests his head on Edgar’s shoulder, and drifts.

He dreams of unfamiliar hallways, creaking wood and low light and the stench of something sweet and rotten and unfamiliar. Somewhere above him, he can hear the distant sound of footsteps on the stairs.

Tess has the ankh. She still has the ankh he gave her.

~~

Technically, visiting hours don’t start until ten on weekends, but Jimmy is _family,_ which apparently means he can weasel his way back into Tess’ room an hour early. Johnny blows back through the doors of the visiting room looking scrappy and bristling at around nine, and agrees to take Jimmy’s place as a glorified pillow for a now very unconscious Edgar. They trade off.

Tess is awake and upright by the time he finds his way back. She looks distracted, fingers tapping on her scrawny wrists, and when did she get to be so much _smaller_ than him? “Hi,” she says, not looking at him. Her eyes are barely open. “What did you want?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“No one comes to talk to me unless they want something,” she says. She doesn’t sound resentful. She kind of just sounds bored. Matter-of-fact. Jimmy can see her jaw working, even so. “Spit it out.”

He watches her fingers work the ankh, flexing around the chain in small, meaningful twitches. It makes him feel small. “It’s about Nny,” he says at last, “you knew him.”

Clench. The chain crunches against itself. “Yeah.”

“I want to know how,” he says, “it was Devi, wasn’t it?”

Slowly, she extends her arm, the ankh clutched in her fingers by the stem, vertical, like a shield against a force Jimmy can’t see. “Five-foot-nine, hispanic woman, dark hair, green eyes,” she rattles off quickly. It would come off bored if her arms weren’t trembling. “If you look through the records of the police department you can find my official…”

She clenches her eyes shut and grinds her teeth into silence.

“What happened, Tess? What did she do?”

Her breathing sounds labored. Her teeth grind in her jaw. “It’s so dark down there,” she says, “it’s fucking freezing - I looked into her eyes and they sank all the way down, there were floors below, miles and miles and - it was a well, a well and it went straight down, and I could hear her screaming at the bottom…”

She pulls the ankh back, presses it against her sternum through the thin hospital gown. Her eyes snap wide, staring across the room at the empty chair in the corner.

“I thought I could pull her out, but it was echoes, just echoes, every time I reached her voice it was just a wall, bouncing back to nothingness…the worm, it was the worm…she was someone else before, she’s something else at the bottom…it was going to collapse in on us,” she says, and her head turns towards him. Instinctively, he flinches back, afraid to look into her eyes. “I had to pull us out. He couldn’t. He was too deep down, too deep, trying to find her hand to pull her back. I couldn’t leave him. I couldn’t let him stay.”

Outside, Jimmy can hear footsteps walking paths along sterile linoleum. Tess crumples like wet paper, dripping over her lap like a morose flower watching its reflection in a stream. The ankh is clenched in both her hands.

“Tess?” Jimmy ventures, when the silence has stretched for at least a minute. She seems unresponsive. “Tess?”

“What am I doing here?” She whispers. “What am I doing here?”

~~

Jimmy takes three tries to get his fucking cigarette to light, but it’s fine, it’s fine. His fucking lighter is broken, is all.

This is bullshit. None of this should bother him - he’s hard, dammit, he’s not - but she knew Devi, she knew the name. That’s what’s bothering him, that’s what he keeps coming back to. Devi’s not just some specter of Nny’s past, not a ghost or a conglomerate, she’s alive and breathing somewhere, and she fucked with Tess.

That’s what it comes back to. Jimmy figured Devi was one of those bitches who took fragile things in just to see them break, and maybe she is. But Tess doesn’t - she’s not - 

Maybe he was just a stupid kid who never got it, alright, fine. Kids are shitty and stupid, so it follows that he must’ve been shitty and stupid, too. But - but he can’t shake the memory of her white knuckles on the steering wheel at four in the morning. He’d asked to go, and she didn’t even ask where - and when he’d pussed out, because fucking of course he did, she’d _covered_ for him. That’s shit Jimmy doesn’t easily forget. She could’ve gotten off the hook if she’d thrown him under the bus, but she took the blame for both of them.

“Excuse me,” says a voice, and Jimmy breaks from his train of thought to turn, “do you have a light?”

“Oh. Sure,” he says, and digs the lighter back out of his pocket. “Help yourself. ’S fuckin’ broken, though.”

“That’s fine,” the woman says, and lights her cigarette in one go. Jimmy watches her with detached interest. A couple months ago, she would’ve been exactly his type - goth chick, sharp eyeliner, dyed hair, probably on the Southern side of crazy and just fucked up enough to do it in a parking lot - but he doesn’t fuck around like that anymore. It’s not like he gives a shit about monogamy or whatever, it’s just kind of pointless to fuck chicks when Edgar’s right there. It’s not like they can make him feel the way he does, anyway. Fuck, that sounds gay.

“Who’re you in for?” He asks after a moment, because it seems like the right thing to say, and also he’s got a crazy feeling this chick would steal his lighter if he didn’t remind her he existed. She glances up at him, halfway through a drag even he wouldn’t attempt. She’s been breathing that shit in for like, four seconds. Damn, this bitch is hardcore.

“You know,” she says, noncommittally, “humanity at large. The sickness we’re all suffering.” He stares at her. She glances back - dark eyeshadow, green eyes, weird choice. “I’m working on an art project,” she says after a moment, “I needed to get inspired. Look at some dying people.”

“Metal,” Jimmy says.

“How about you? You dying?” Her eyes run him up and down, like she’s hunting for some weakness, or maybe just evaluating him for potential. It’s the most interested in him she’s looked for the entirety of the conversation. He almost hates to disappoint her - she seems kind of cool. Her hair’s this weird shade of purple he’s never seen before. It’s like…dark-neon?

“Nah, I think I got a couple more years in this thing,” Jimmy says, “my sister got hit by a car. I’m just here to pick her up. She’s alive,” he adds, since it feels like the right thing to say, “she’s said some weird shit recently, though. I’m kind of worried, I guess. I mean - “ he breaks off, stares out at the parking lot on the far side of the building. On the one hand, telling strangers about his personal problems feels weird. On the other hand, Edgar keeps giving him these soft, reassuring looks, which stress him the fuck out, and Johnny’s not exactly a big listener. At least Goth Chick will keep standing in his proximity. Plus, there’s, like, zero consequences for dumping your guts out for a stranger. This is a win-win for everyone except Goth Chick, but like, she still hasn’t given him his lighter back, so who’s really at fault here?

“I don’t think I should even care,” he says, “like, we weren’t ever that close, and I haven’t seen her in years. It’s not like we were ever friends - but I keep thinking - there was this time back when I was a shitty kid, right? And I tried to run away from home, and when she caught me, instead of turning me in to the rents, she just told me to grab my stuff and get in the car, and we just drove. And I mean, when I was fifteen or whatever, I figured she was just ride-or-die, but now I’m thinking - I mean, she was running away from something too, right? Nobody just gets in the car and drives unless there’s something on their tail.” He takes a long drag, then stifles a cough. Goth Chick doesn’t look particularly interested, but she also doesn’t look like she’s ignoring him. The perfect medium of indifference. This is the best audience he could have asked for. “I looked it up,” he says, “I’m only one of, like, three people on her emergency contact list, and one of them’s not even a real person. And it’s like - I always thought it was weird, like, she seemed super social when I was a kid, how can she only have three people she knows? Why’d she even think of me?”

“People change,” Goth Chick says. “I used to be a different person than I am now. Sometimes things don’t go the way you planned.”

“Yeah?” Jimmy’s not really interested, but he can’t keep an audience if he doesn’t keep up the back-and-forth. “You thought you’d be somewhere else, right?”

“I never thought I’d be okay with the kind of shit that’s commonplace to me these days,” she says, “but I moved into this house, and things changed. Everything’s different now. I’m different now.”

“How so?”

Goth Chick looks out at the parking lot, lips pursed. After a few seconds and a final, lengthy drag, she drops her half-finished cigarette on the asphalt and grinds it out under her heel. “Nice talking to you,” she says after a moment, “thanks for the light.”

She turns around and goes inside. Jimmy listens to the door shut, cigarette hanging noncommittally out of his mouth, then suddenly has a thought. He pats his pockets aimlessly. She stole his fucking lighter right in front of him.

~~

“Dude, she stole my lighter _right in front of me,_ ” Jimmy is telling Edgar two hours later. Edgar is ignoring him.

“I was speaking with Dr. Tchao,” he says, apropos of nothing and definitely not apropos of Jimmy telling him that a goth chick stole his lighter in the hospital’s smoking cloche, “he says Tess isn’t actually in a state of physical stress, they’ve just been keeping her until someone came by to pick her up. She’s ready to go whenever we are.”

“Dude,” Jimmy says, “are you listening to me? She took my lighter, like, I just gave it to her and she walked off with it.”

“Who? Tess?”

“No, this goth chick who was smoking out back, she - “

“Lighters are only a couple bucks, Jimmy,” Edgar says, “if you really need one, I can just buy you another one. It’s no big deal.”

“That’s not the _point,_ she - “

“Anyway, I thought you said your lighter was broken.”

“I don’t care about the fucking lighter! I care that this chick just took it and left. I just let her take it, I knew it was my lighter, it was in her hand and I didn’t even stop her.”

“I’m sorry,” Edgar says, and he does _look_ sorry, which helps his case some, “who are we talking about again?”

Jimmy gives up. Edgar’s looking at him, and listening, but no matter how many times he says exactly what happened in the clearest fucking English he can manage while he’s literally seething with rage, it’s not penetrating even a little bit. It’s like anything he says about Goth Chick is getting erased somewhere between his mouth and Edgar’s ears. “Nothing,” he says, “it’s not a big deal. Lighters aren’t that expensive.” The second he says it, it’s suddenly the truest thing he’s ever heard come out of his own mouth. Nothing happened. His lighter got nicked by somebody, that’s all. Lighters are only a couple bucks. “What’s this about Tess?”

“She can come back with us,” Edgar says, “but she can’t drive. She’s on some pretty strong painkillers, but apparently everything’s healed over. If she’s ready, we can head out later today.”

“Oh. Cool,” Jimmy says. “Did you know she and Johnny know each other?”

“I found out earlier today,” Edgar says, “I thought I should introduce myself, and he was in the room talking to her. Apparently she - “ he breaks off nervously.

“Yeah, I know,” Jimmy says, “they both knew Devi. I’m not gonna blow up about it, dude, I’m fine.”

Edgar’s shoulders relax. “It’s a terribly small world,” he says after a moment, “she seems nice. I can see the family resemblance.”

“Don’t go flirting with my sister, Vargas. You’ve promised to make an honest woman out of me.”

“Have I? Nobody told _me._ ”

They find Johnny in Tess’ hospital room, crouching up on one of the chairs by her bed and smiling benignly down at his hand apparatus. He’s got a sketch pad in the crook of one elbow and a pencil attached to him at a weird angle. Behind him, he can hear Edgar give a tiny, exhausted sigh. Johnny gets kind of unmanageable once he starts drawing.

Except Johnny isn’t hissing in frustration. And the pencil isn’t sticking straight out of his hand like it usually is when Jimmy loops one in. Upon closer inspection, the thing hooked into his glove looks like a repurposed drafting compass or something, a clamp holding the pencil almost parallel to his hand. “Hey,” Jimmy says, “where’d you get this?”

Johnny glances up at him. “Tess made it,” he says cheerfully, “it’s for drawing.”

“Well, _made_ is a little strong,” Tess says, when Jimmy turns to stare at her with eyes like twin moons, “I kind of borrowed it from the hospital. Without permission. It’s a prosthetic,” she adds, “one of the kids on this floor uses one, but she’s in surgery right now, so it was just sitting out.”

“You stole this from a kid?”

“I was going to put it back,” she says defensively, “I just thought you should see it. Johnny said you built his hand from scratch, I thought if you saw this, maybe you could make something like that.”

Jimmy looks back at the clamp. It’s almost hand-shaped up close, but if he could break a compass in half, he could get the same basic effect - or if he kept it in one piece, but he sanded down the spike to keep the degree-wheel-thingy, maybe Johnny could adjust where the pencil was? The sketch he’s working on now looks…good. Like, it’s definitely shaky, Johnny’s clearly pretty out of practice, but like, it’s not the same hapless squiggles that his struggles with the glove have produced in the past. He can see what the lines are supposed to look like. There’s crosshatching.

“That’s very kind of you,” Edgar says, “but you’re going to have to put that back where you found it.”

“I said I was going to,” Tess says, sounding appropriately chagrined, “it’s not like I’m going to steal somebody’s prosthetic, I’m not a _complete_ monster.”

“A good sentiment, but you did very much steal that,” Edgar says, “just to be clear, that’s what you did - “

“How much do you think a compass would cost?” Jimmy interrupts. “Like the - not the direction thingy, like, the clip that you put a pencil in and it makes circles. Could we get one at a Staples or something?”

Edgar turns to blink at him. “A couple bucks, I guess,” he suggests after a moment, “ten dollars? Not too much.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says, “then I can make one of these.”

“Knew you could,” Tess says, and smiles. By the time Jimmy thinks to smile back, her face is fading back into dull confusion. “Uh, not that I don’t love this repartee we have, but is there a reason you two are here?” She says after a moment. “Other than to remind me that stealing is bad, of course.”

Like a champ, Edgar refuses to rise to the bait. “We just got word from your doctor that you can leave later today,” he says instead, smoothing over troubled waters, “do you want to spend another night in the hospital and leave in the morning, or should I start doing paperwork now so we can leave today?”

“I mean, not to cause trouble, but any scenario where I can eat anything other than hospital food is the ideal situation for me,” Tess says, “I’ll eat shitty fast food if it means I don’t have to eat another cup of jello for as long as I live.”

“So that’s a ‘no’ on staying overnight,” Edgar says, faux solemnly, “bummer. I was hoping I could sit in an uncomfortable chair and watch reruns of Fox News for eight hours.”

Tess laughs so hard she snorts, sending the monitor on her pulse wild. “You know what, Vargas?” She says, once she’s cycled through laughing, snorting, and coughing. “You’re alright. Do you know who I’ve got to blow to get my clothes back?”


	2. The bitch with a broken jaw

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In writing this chapter, I learned two things. One: sibling drama is super easy to exploit. Two: 'huck' is not a word. I spent my childhood thinking it was a term similar to the way we use the word 'yeet' today. not so. No one has ever yelled "HUCK" while throwing anything.
> 
> Also, I love Tess, and to prove it, I'm giving her a lot of comedy bits. Not one of you can stop me.

“I’m sorry,” Edgar says, “is this…it?”

They’re standing in front of a table strewn with a couple apparently random items. A change of clothes, a couple of rusted or broken keys on a ring, a wallet, a pair of earrings, a notebook. A Jansport backpack with one of the arms ripped almost in half. An assortment of pens.

The nurse shrugs. “That’s everything they could recover from the car,” she says. She doesn’t seem particularly broken up about it. “Apparently, there wasn’t very much to begin with, and it caught fire not too long after they pulled her out.”

“It caught _fire?_ ”

“Spontaneous combustion. There was probably a gas leak or something. Anyway, look on the bright side,” she says, “at least it’ll all fit in the bag!”

Jimmy’s more or less been keeping his mouth shut through this conversation, less because he’s being stoic and cool and more because he figures the length of this encounter is directly proportional to how much they engage with it. But looking at the tiny mess made up of all of Tess’ earthly possessions, he’s struck with another thought. “Hey,” he says, “are patients allowed to have jewelry and stuff in the hospital? I thought that was off limits.”

“Right, the necklace,” she says, and starts scooping the garbage on the table into the bag, “normally, patients aren’t allowed to have any jewelry at all, but that’s more for a surgical situation. Also, your sister was literally unmanageable without that thing. We tried to take it away from her, and she went into hysterics until she got it back. It got pretty ugly. She stabbed a doctor.”

“She what?” Jimmy’s kind of impressed. He remembered Tess being cool, but not ‘stabbing a doctor’ cool.

“Why do you think she had a private room? She kept stealing things, and she went into these fits - we had to move her away from other patients just to keep her from affecting them. Anyway, your problem now,” the nurse says, and hands them the backpack with a certain finality. “She’s probably dressed. Thanks for stopping by! Please get her out of my hospital.”

Edgar slings the bag over his shoulder, and they make their way towards the exit. “She seemed…unprofessional,” he admits after a moment, glancing over his shoulder to double-check for prying ears.

“Dude, tell me about it,” Jimmy says, “when she took me to see Tess, she literally just brought me to the door and bounced. If Johnny wasn’t there, I probably wouldn’t even have found my way back. That place is like a fucking labyrinth.”

“She _ditched_ you?” Edgar sounds offended on his behalf, which is just like him, honestly. Worrying about bullshit slights against Jimmy that no one else would blink at. He could probably do it professionally.

“Yeah, man, like she was scared to hang around. Fuck this place. I felt like a fucking sacrifice left on an altar or something, bait to lure a beast out.”

Edgar squints at him. “You been spending a lot of time with Johnny?”

“Huh?”

“I’m just saying, that’s a very _him_ thing to say,” he says, and smiles. “You’ve got the rant down.”

“Hey, I can say rant-y stuff too,” Jimmy says, “I think about stuff, you know? I can be deep. I can be poem- uh- poetry. I’ve got the soul of an artist.”

“Do you mean poetic?”

“I know what I said,” he doubles down, “am I not poetry in motion? Do I not bleed?”

“Honestly, I have no idea what we’re talking about right now,” Edgar says, and smiles.

Jimmy opens his mouth to respond, but pauses. Above him, very faintly—maybe from the ceiling, or the floor above them—he can hear that same sound of skittering paws from Tess’ room the night before. As he strains to hear, it starts to grow louder, to multiply, as though one creature has grown into a dozen—a hundred. He looks at Edgar. “What _is_ that?”

Edgar blinks at him. “What’s what?”

“Can’t you hear that?” He gestures up towards the ceiling helplessly. It’s getting louder. It sounds less like rats now, more like a pack of predators, dogs or wolves stampeding through the dark. “It’s so fucking loud! What the hell is that noise?”

“I can’t hear anything,” Edgar says firmly, and takes him by the arm. “We need to get outside.”

Jimmy doesn’t protest. He’s not staying in a building that sounds like that.

~~

They don’t say anything about the noise when they pass through the doors and into the sunlight, and Jimmy’s kind of relieved. There’s no amount of money you could pay him to stay in a building where random wildlife runs rampant through the halls. Although, now that he thinks about it, that could have been an echo chamber situation, right? Maybe he just _thought_ he heard a herd of animals charging down a hallway a floor above him. Maybe it was just…the sound of Edgar’s shoes echoing around, or the backpack, somehow. That’s probably why Edgar wasn’t reacting to it. He was probably paying attention to the source.

Anyway, outdoors isn’t an echo chamber, so they’re all good. That’s the end of that mystery. No point in examining it further.

Tess is standing with Johnny, nodding vaguely along with something he’s yelling about from his seat on the hood of the car. The sunlight does her good—away from the white lights of the hospital, she looks less sickly, hardly washed out at all. The absence of the hospital gown helps too. It’s good to know she still wears all black in the heat, even if there’s no sleeves on that turtleneck- uh- dress- thing. Whatever, it’s probably fashionable. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

She turns as they approach and holds her hands out expectantly for her bag. Edgar passes it to her with a grimace. “That’s all they could recover,” he says, apology leaking out of every orifice, “if you need—“

“Holy shit,” Tess says, unzipping the bag and peering inside, “look at all this stuff! I just figured they lost everything when the car went up—hell _yes,_ is that my sweater?” From the bottom of the bag, she yanks out what looks like a loose sheaf of black fabric and slings it over her arms. Even unbuttoned, the cardigan hangs to her knees, like it’s seven sizes too large for her despite the rolled sleeves.

“Is that cotton?” Johnny says, sliding off the hood to pinch at the fabric. Jimmy frowns. Johnny doesn’t instigate touch with just _anyone_ —he had to work at it for _months_ to get Johnny to, like, let him put a stone in his hand. Or tape shit to his nubs. Or—or, you know—touch him. Since when does he touch other people? Does Johnny have a thing about cardigans? Should Jimmy start wearing cardigans?

“I think it’s an alpaca-wool blend,” she says, still hunting through her bag. If the contact surprises her, she certainly doesn’t show it. “My journal’s in here too? Damn, they got _everything,_ huh?”

“That’s—that’s it?” Edgar asks, wheels visibly spinning in his head. “You didn’t have anything else?”

She shrugs. “I don’t need much,” she says, “clothes, keys, wallet. Something to do. It’s not like I was backpacking across Europe or anything, I was just keeping myself out of California for a little while. It has been a _crazy_ month, all things considered, though. Hey, that reminds me,” she says, and snaps her fingers, “what day is it? I’ve been in and out of consciousness so much, I think I’ve lost all sense of time.”

“Oh, uh,” Edgar says, “it’s April third.”

Tess blinks at him. Her eyes turn up to the hospital. “ _Hhhhuh,_ ” she says, “that took longer than I thought.”

“What?” Jimmy says.

“I mean,” she says, “it was _October_ when they brought me in. That’s—that’s five months. I thought I was only there a couple of weeks, what did they have me _taking?_ ”

“Tess, no,” Jimmy says, “they brought you in two weeks ago. In March.”

“Oh,” she says. “Oh. Oh, shit. Oh. Shit. Really? Shit. Oh, shit. Fuck.”

“Uh,” Jimmy says.

“No, wait, look,” she says, and starts digging around in her bag again, “I kept a journal so I could keep track of time. I wrote something once a day—here, look,” she says, and wrenches it out. Jimmy takes it in two hands—it’s one of those big five-hundred page ones—and flips through it. “See, and I put the date in the top right corner, so I could keep track. I didn’t want to be one of those crazies who doesn’t know what year it is, you know?”

The notebook’s thick, and beat up badly. It’s one of those spiral-bound shindigs that was probably supposed to be for five different subjects in college or something. The cardboard cover is barely holding on, mostly torn to shreds around the little eyeholes that the spiral goes through, and worn down in wrinkles and lines. He flips through it quickly. The first couple pages look like actual notes for a class—bullet points, highlighter lines, doodles of those weird Egyptian picture letters, that kind of thing—and there’s a couple pages of just scribbles, big and angry looking. Next to him, Edgar says something about checking the map to find a place to eat, and carefully migrates himself and Johnny out of his personal bubble without actually getting in the car. In front of him, Tess crosses her arms.

“Uh,” Jimmy says, “there’s a page here where you just wrote ‘do I still have hands?’ like…thirty times. Is that—“

“Oh, that’s not from the road trip,” she says, “I was still in school. My professor made me unbox a bunch of shit and catalog it all, my hands were cramping up like a bitch. Go to—skip ahead. Flip past that marker.”

Dutifully, Jimmy flips through a couple pages, and keeps going until he sees _October 1_ written in the top right corner in tiny, neat print. He glances down at the text, sees the sentence _’How many times is she going to call before she figures out I’m not having sex with her again?’_ and immediately lets his eyes shoot back up to the top of the page. Nope nope nope, he is not dealing with that. He’s here to check dates, not to—uh—check up on dates. Figure out what’s going on in Tess’ personal life. Is Tess gay? He thought she had a boyfriend. Tess has sex? This is so out of his league. This is beyond the pale. He flips through a couple more pages. October 10 gets a little decorative border. October 13 has barely anything written on it. October—Jimmy frowns. The next page says October 13, too.

And the next one.

Jimmy flips through more pages. He picks up a clump of them and fans through. October 13. October 13. He hazards a glance at the text. _’Saw a bird today. Pretty feathering. Wish I could draw it.’_ says one page. _’She won’t shut up,_ ’ says the next, _’i keep yelling at her and yelling at her but she won’t shut up. So i fucked up!! So what?? Lots of people speak German it’s not my ~~fault fault fault~~ she doesn’t know how to teach. Du schön und zart Gebild…i wish i could remember…’_ October 13 stretches between two of the little built-in subject dividers. If there’s five subjects in this notebook, then each subject must be about a hundred pages. When it ends, the next page is marked _October 1._

He looks up at Tess.

“Oh no,” she says, “what’s that face?”

“Uh,” Jimmy says.

“Just tell me,” she says. Her face twists like she’s biting the inside of her cheek. “Jimmy, just tell me what’s wrong.”

He opens his mouth and tries to say something, but all that comes out is a little half-sigh. “If I tell you,” he manages after a moment, “are you gonna freak out?”

“Probably,” she says, “I’m freaked out _right now._ You’re freaking me out. But if you _don’t_ tell me, I’m just going to figure it out myself later and kick your ass for making me do extra work.”

“There’s—you—“ Jimmy flips through the pages. “You wrote in this once a day?”

“Yeah, I—whenever I saw the sun come up,” she says. “Why?”

“There’s like…five hundred pages in this notebook,” he says, “and it’s almost full. Once a day, for four or five hundred days…I’m not the best at math, but that’s, like…a year and a half, Tess.”

She stares at him. After a second, she reaches out to take the journal back, and he hands it to her without hesitation. Just holding it is making him antsy. “Well,” she says, “that’s that, then.”

“That’s that?”

“Yup,” she says firmly, “I’d love to have an existential crisis about that, but instead I’m going to pretend this conversation never happened. I’m very hungry, Jimmy. I haven’t had solid food in however long I’ve been in hospice. I want some protein before I basically freak the fuck out.”

“Oh,” Jimmy says, “okay. You can just…push that off?”

“No,” she says, “but I’m gonna pretend I can. Hey, Vargas,” she calls, “we know where we’re eating yet?”

~~

“Hey,” Tess says, as they wriggle their way into a booth, “you know something that always confused me in medical dramas and stuff?”

“Oh, good, medical dramas,” Edgar says, “just the thing I _want_ to talk about before dinner.”

If Tess is aware of the sarcasm in his voice, she ignores it. “The final solution they come to at the end of the episode? It never solves the thing that got the patient hospitalized in the first place,” she says.

“Do we _have_ to talk about this?”

“No, I think I’m into it,” Jimmy says. Edgar gives him a Look. “I mean, I don’t _watch_ hospital dramas that much, but the, uh, essay-ish…uh—oh! The _academic phraseology_ of your _thesis_ is interesting me strangely.” He shoots Edgar a look back, barely containing the smug glee flowing over the rim of his blackened, shriveled heart. And Edgar accuses him of not listening to him. But like, where else was Jimmy going to learn words like ‘academic phraseology’, huh? That’s an Edgar thing.

“You’re just proud you remembered that,” Edgar grumbles, but he covers his mouth with a hand like he always does when he’s grinning but he doesn’t want anyone to say anything about it. Goddamn, he’s so transparent. And cute. Can dudes be cute? _This_ dude can be cute.

“Okay, so here’s the thing,” Tess says, “every medical drama intro is just, like, a scene where a normal person is doing normal stuff and then, you know, whoops! They have a stroke. Or an aneurism, but for the sake of my argument let’s say it’s a stroke.”

“It’s an argument?” Edgar asks. “Wait, do _you_ think you’re writing an essay?”

Tess ignores him. “So the patient has a stroke, first commercial break, they’re in the hospital now. And the doctors are going apeshit, they can’t figure out what’s going on and also, there’s like some drama about how Mandy Patinkin is like, dating someone, or something, and that kind of takes front stage. But anyway, the patient proceeds to have another, uh…they start bleeding internally. Oh no! The doctors try to figure out what could have caused a stroke _and_ internal bleeding. Secondary subplot about some other patient, or which doctors are fucking who, whatever, and we’re back.” She waves her hands around. “The doctors now know that _medicalisus diseasus_ has caused these symptoms, and they give the patient the totally legit medicine to fix everything. But we’re only twenty minutes into an hour long program. Weird music starts playing, and suddenly, bam! The patient _shits a lung._ Commercial break!” She elbows Johnny. “Pretty dramatic stuff, right?”

“Huh?” 

“A pretty dramatic juncture, right?” Tess prompts.

“I’m sorry, I wasn’t listening,” Johnny says, blinking piteously. “I was thinking about something else. Do you think I could get crayons here? Is this an establishment which stimulates artistic growth in the children of the future?”

“I mean, probably,” Edgar says, clearly eager for the topic change and, by the looks of him, already seriously regretting hearing about someone’s lung coming out of their butt, “I could flag our waiter down and ask. They probably won’t ignore me, I’ve got—I’ve got pretty long arms…”

Tess considers him. “You’re a good friend, Vargas,” she says after a moment.

“I—oh,” Edgar says. He blinks. “I, uh—thank you, I—“

“ _So we come back from the commercial break,_ ” Tess interrupts. Whatever Edgar was about to say gets lost in the tide. “The doctors are all freaking out now, both due to their emotional fuck-related drama, and _also_ because they gotta put that vital organ back in the patient’s chest after it came out through their ass. _But,_ because of the dramatic nature of the event, they figure out that the real culprit is _diseasium medicalplios_ , which would explain internal bleeding and shitting your own lung out. But like…” She waves a hand vaguely in the air. “The second cure, the one that fixes the patient forever—like, it never explains the stroke at the beginning of the episode, does it? Isn’t that _weird?”_

There’s a pause. Edgar sighs. “Well, I’m _so_ glad we had this conversation right before dinner,” he says.

“It just came to mind,” Tess says, “I’ve been watching a _lot_ of TV lately, lots of medical procedurals, that kind of thing. It’s why I’ve been hallucinating myself in a hospital for, like, two weeks.”

“Uh, no,” Jimmy says, “you were actually in a hospital. We’re in Nebraska, remember? We came to pick you up.”

Tess looks at him, and for a second, he’s worried she’s going to glaze over and start mumbling incoherently, like when he asked her about Devi—but instead, she grins. “Haha,” she says, “that’s right, you guys are real! I completely forgot. Man, what a world, right?” She turns her head and stares out the window. “That I’d end up in a hospital after watching so many dudes hack up a lung on M*A*S*H or whatever? You gotta admit, the coincidence is pretty wild. Speaking of, though, if this is real—hey, Johnny, are we…good?” As if accentuating her point, she shifts her gaze to him, and points her finger back and forth between the two of them.

Nny blinks. “I think so,” he says, “why wouldn’t we be?”

“Well, I feel like the last time I saw you—and in retrospect, it may not have happened, so I’m gonna need your feedback on this one, but I _feel_ like the _last_ time I saw you, I stabbed you forty-seven times in the chest,” she says.

Jimmy spits water across the table.

“So I’m just—I mean, some people hold onto things like that, so I’m just gonna need a—like, a confirm/deny,” she continues on, “did that happen, can you remember. And if so, are we cool, or are we going to have to go at it in the parking lot?”

Jimmy feels, more than sees, Edgar suddenly shift, shoulders tensing. He recognizes that stance from every fight that’s ever gotten ugly at the soup kitchen, every screaming fit they’ve ever seen Nny fly into. He’s ready to pull them apart if shit gets ugly. Jimmy shifts his feet further apart. “Hey, Tess,” he says, “let’s just—“

“I don’t _remember_ that,” Nny interrupts him, resting the curve of his mouth in the crook of his finger and thumb, “of course, I could check for scarification, if you’d like. But I’m _pretty_ sure the last time I saw you was almost a year ago, and you flew away from me then.”

“Oh, okay. Cool,” she says, forehead wrinkling. “Why?”

“I insulted you, I think,” he says morosely, “though I didn’t mean to. We were huddled around a fire, lit off the bones of fallen angels, you in your armor and I in my robes, and you were reciting the poem _der Tod und das Mädchen_ to me when I interrupted you for some reason that now escapes my fragile memory.”

Jimmy thinks _’what the fuck is happening’_ at the exact moment that his sister glances at him with that exact phrase written over every one of her features. “Well, I have to give it to you,” she says, after a far longer pause than necessary, “that does _sound_ like me.”

Nny nods, but his gaze is wandering - it catches on the bar, the movement of the bartender passing a drink down the wood. “You retreated inside your coat,” he says dreamily, “and when I reached out to pull the lapels apart and issue my apology, you were seven birds—and you departed in a flurry of black feathers and light. I never saw you again. Nor her. You set me free.”

He glances up at Tess, eye wide and glinting in the sunlight. Tess clicks her tongue in her mouth. “Uh, okay,” she says, “I wanna say I’m—and it’s important that I get this number right,” she adds, “I wanna say I’m…eighty…four. Percent sure. That that didn’t happen.”

What the fuck?

“Eighty-four?” Jimmy says, and it’s like he’s slapping Tess and Nny out of a private reverie - they startle as they turn to look at him. “Fucking eighty-four?”

“You got a problem with eighty-four?” Tess asks.

“Yeah, I got a _problem,_ ” he snaps, “my problem is it’s not fucking a hundred! _Eighty-four?_ You’re not _a hundred percent sure_ you didn’t turn into _birds?_ ”

“Oh, a _hundred?_ You want me to be a _hundred_ percent sure?” Tess snaps. “I was a hundred percent sure that it was _October_ for _eighteen months!_ You want me to be _certain?_ I can’t be _certain_ of _anything!_ ”

“Okay, okay,” Edgar half-shouts, and honestly, Jimmy has to give it to that guy—he knows how to deal with confrontation, and he does it fast. “Jimmy, take a walk.”

“But—“

“You two are _not_ arguing about _birds,_ ” Edgar says firmly, “you both need to cool down, now, and you’re not doing it in the same room. When you’re calm, we’re going to figure out what the problem is.”

Jimmy sighs. His brain feels like it’s on fire, which—okay, is probably Edgar’s point, but he’s still pissed. Fuck this conflict resolution bullshit. “Fine,” he snaps, “I’ll be outside.”

The air doesn’t do him any good, no fucking surprise. He pulls a cigarette out of his jacket pocket before he remembers he doesn’t have his lighter anymore, so he can’t even fucking smoke. Fucking perfect. This day just keeps getting fucking better, right? Fuck this shit. He scowls at the sign outside the diner. _’Antonio’s drinks and firearms’_ , it proudly proclaims in red neon, and below, in smaller, blue neon, _’Because you have to eat to live, and we’re right here’_. Amen to that.

Fucking Tess. How can she act like she doesn’t even care? What, is he supposed to worry for both of them? He kicks a rock. How can she just…not be bothered by any of this? And why’s she so close with Johnny, anyway? Sure, they both knew that bitch, but Johnny told him that most people didn’t live more than a couple days in that house. They couldn’t even have known each other that long, what’s with the fire-forged friendship bullshit? How come he lets her elbow him? And what _happened_ to her down there? Why can’t she just tell him? He thought he was…not, you know, _important,_ but he’s the one she called, isn’t he?

She wrote _October 13_ a hundred days in a row.

“Hey,” says Edgar, and Jimmy turns as he approaches, “you feeling a little less wound up?”

Jimmy sighs. It’s annoying, but he actually does feel better. Man, fuck this wishy-washy feelings bullshit that Edgar’s so good at. Fucking conflict resolution, this shit is garbage. “Yeah,” he says, “you want a cigarette?”

Edgar gives him a look. “I don’t smoke.”

“Yeah, well, apparently neither do I,” Jimmy says, “still don’t have a lighter. I meant to buy one before we left.”

“What happened to your old one?”

Jimmy shrugs. “Someone nicked it,” he says, “when we were at the hospital. I gave it to some weird chick and she just kinda wandered off with it. I dunno. It’s no big, lighters are only a couple bucks.”

“Oh, that’s right, I think you told me that,” Edgar says. “So what happened in there? What’s up?”

“Before we talk about this, I just want to reaffirm that conflict resolution is bullshit and I hate it,” Jimmy says, “so you can jot that down.”

“Consider it noted.”

He sighs again. “Tess is the only relative I ever looked up to,” he says, “like, she was related to me, and she had her shit together. She was an adult, you know? And now, she—she doesn’t remember shit, and she’s crazy, and she can’t be left on her own. She’s like a baby.” He waves his unlit cigarette emphatically. “Also I know it’s petty, but I don’t get her thing with Johnny? How are they friends? It’s like he looks up to her, but he’s never mentioned her before. Just—I thought we were important to him, but there’s—this sounds like I’m jealous,” he says, “I’m not _jealous_ of—I’m not! Don’t give me that look! I just don’t get why he never told us about this, like…about _any_ person who was important to him. It doesn’t even matter that I’m related to her or whatever, I just…” he sighs. “I just always thought it was going to be the three of us, and now I feel like…I’m locked out, you know?”

Edgar nods and leans against the brick. “I didn’t know you had a sister until you got the call,” he says, “I don’t know anything about your family. We don’t ever talk about it. When I met her, I realized that—I love both of you, but…we don’t know very much about each other, do we? I get it.”

Jimmy shifts from one foot to the other. “We know the important stuff,” he says. It doesn’t feel as true as it usually does. “Does Tess make you nervous?”

“Only a little,” he says. “Mostly, I feel—well. Locked out, like you said. I don’t know her.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “She likes you, though.”

“Does she?”

“Honestly? I have no idea.” He shrugs. “She’s impossible to read and I haven’t seen her in, like, half a decade. But what kind of monster _wouldn’t_ like you?”

Edgar smiles. “You ready to talk?” He asks. “Come on, let’s go inside.”

Tess seems way chilled out when they get back, which is a relief, plus their drinks are at the table, which is a double relief. Since they’re planning on crashing at a hotel tonight instead of powering through like they did on the way down, Jimmy actually gets to drink a beer, which he sorely fucking needs, by the way. He can’t remember the last time he was wound this tight. His sister has something dark in front of her that’s probably going to interfere with the pain meds she’s on, or would if she hadn’t been visibly cheeking them the last time on the schedule. Johnny’s just drinking fizzy pop.

“Hey, kid,” she says when he sits down, “sorry for blowing up. I’m not actually mad at you.”

“Yeah, same,” he says, “I guess we just blew that way out of proportion.”

“Blowing minor disagreements into huge fights _is_ the oldest and most sacred tradition of our bloodline,” she says, “so it follows that we’d be super good at it.”

Edgar clears his throat meaningfully.

“ _Buuut,_ ” she continues, “in the desire to have Edgar not be mad at us anymore, I’ll olive branch the fuck out of this thing. I’m just freaking out because I was missing for a year and a half, and nobody even noticed I was gone, okay? It’s not really on _you,_ ‘cause we weren’t really close, but I knew a bunch of people who _should’ve_ noticed I was missing, and didn’t. Plus, I way underestimated how crazy I was for that time, like…I was out of control. I lost a year of my life. That’s fucking terrifying.” She takes a sip of the drink she’s definitely not supposed to be having.

“Yeah, and I just got freaked out because you were always way tougher than me, but this weird shitty thing happened to you, and I couldn’t do anything about it,” he says. “I feel bad, I guess. I couldn’t do anything to help you because we barely know each other anymore.”

“Aw, that’s sweet,” she says, “alright, are we done, though? Can we be done? This is very vulnerable and I hate feeling emotions.”

“Oh, same,” Jimmy says, “did we order yet? Please, let’s talk about _anything_ else now.”

When he glances at Edgar, he’s smiling. Okay. So they’re done, right? They did the thing. Things are probably going to end up being okay.

They can probably road trip this out.

~~

They stop at a hotel an hour or so down the road, check in around ten-thirty. Jimmy’s still warm and content on the two beers he ended up drinking when Edgar put his foot down and commandeered Tess’ out of her hand. Apparently, alcohol + opioids = actual death via depressed breathing and suffocation. Who’da thought. Side note: Tess takes her beer super dark and crazy bitter. It felt like getting kicked in the teeth. Jimmy will drink literally anything, and generally just defaults to beer because it’s cheap and alcoholic, but as far as he can tell, she has _preferences_. His preference is just the smallest number in the price column.

Their hotel room has one bed and one couch. Johnny shrugs off any semblance of preference and announces he’s going on a walk to pester the wildlife, leaving the three of them to figure out the sleeping arrangements.

“Well,” Tess says, “I should probably take the couch. Just let me snag the sheet or something, blankets freak me out.”

Jimmy blinks. “Blankets freak you out?”

“They’re heavy,” she says. “I already have enough dreams about getting buried alive or crushed by the walls in my room, I don’t need a legitimate weight on my real human body telling my subconscious that’s a real semi rolling over my corpse.”

“You’re not sleeping on the couch,” Edgar says, “you _just_ got out of the hospital.”

“Yeah, but there’s only room for one person on that thing, and for two on the bed,” she says. “The math checks out.”

“Allow me to reiterate: hospital. One of us can sleep on the floor.”

“We can?” Jimmy says. Edgar rolls his eyes.

“ _I_ will sleep on the floor.”

“What, by yourself?”

Which is how Jimmy ends up in a makeshift cushion-and-blanket nest on the gently stained carpeting, warm, and drowsy and wrapped around Edgar’s back the second the lights go out. Tess holds to her insistence on sleeping under a single sheet, so there’s plenty of cushioning to go around. Still, he can hear Edgar’s back give the telltale pop of a bunch of vertebrae that should not have spent the past day and night sleeping in the back of a car, or a plastic folding chair in a hospital. When they’re not sharing a room with his sister (and yes, don’t ask, it _does_ make everything weird, okay? It’s weird), he can try to push that weird bone rod back into place. For now, he just tucks his face into the crook of his neck and drifts.

Unfortunately, his subconscious doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo re: calming evening full of not-dead sister and debatably tasty beer, and his dreams huff some serious shit. He keeps walking down this super long, rickety wooden hallway, towards the door at the other end—but every time he walks through, it leads him through the door at the beginning of the hallway, and he has to walk down again. Each time he walks through the loop, the hanging lights get dimmer and dimmer, exacerbating the size of the shadows and throwing them from side to side as they swing in a breeze he doesn’t feel. He wants to stop, but the only other door in the hallway is locked, and guarded by a sleeping moth the size of his torso. There’s no other exit, and if he waits, it’ll catch him.

What will?

It’s calling for him. When he stops walking, he can hear its footsteps behind him.

What is it?

The lightbulb burns out above him, and he runs—through the next door into an even darker shadow, through the door again into an oppressive, choking blackness. Again, and he can see stars beyond the walls, distant glittering galaxies below the floor and above the ceiling. This is the only place left in a vast and endless ocean of silence, and he is so alone—it’s just you and me and this house—

What are you?

Someone is screaming from the other side of the locked door, and he grabs the handle, rattles it desperately. The moth’s wings beat once—

Jimmy’s body jerks him into terrified consciousness, a silent convulsion against the warm body next to him. Edgar stirs at the sound of him gasping for breath, but a well-placed hand on the shoulder and the kind of shushing he’s seen people do to horses in movies quickly puts him back down. Jesus, that makes him sound like a baby. Edgar’s not a baby, he’s just fucking exhausted, like the rest of them.

He props himself up on one elbow, hazards a glance towards Tess, but she’s lying still in bed. Johnny’s not back yet, and it’s…he squints at the glowing hotel clock. Two-fifteen in the morning. No point in doing that bullshit thing Edgar does sometimes where, after a bad dream, he just decides to start the day early. He’s gonna have to close his eyes and pretend everything’s still fine.

He puts his head back on the couch cushion and squints at Edgar’s shoulder in the dark. If he just focuses on counting freckles or whatever, and avoids thinking about moths, he should be able to relax back into bed. Which is proving to be a real fucking challenge on the second point, by the way, ‘cause he can hear tiny little wings beating against the light in the bathroom. That’s weird, he doesn’t remember leaving that on.

He’s almost settled back down, the sweat on his shoulders drying out in the arid hotel room atmosphere (seriously, could anyone invest in one window that opens in one hotel room, once?) and his brain going fuzzy, when he hears the soft patter of shockingly lightweight feet across the carpet. He didn’t hear Johnny come in, but when does he ever? Maybe there’s another, non-door entrance to the room or something, or maybe there _was_ a window that opened after all. Either way, it’s always easier to feel safe with someone standing watch.

The footsteps move easily across the room, almost gliding as they compress the carpet just above Jimmy’s head. In the bathroom, the light turns off (maybe it was on a timer?) as Johnny approaches the bed. A soft squeaking noise suggests that he’s sitting on the mattress. Jimmy sighs—he was really close to falling back asleep, too—and props himself up on an elbow, squinting through the dark at the shape at the edge of her bed. “Johnny,” he mumbles, “come on, come away from there.”

Johnny doesn’t respond, which is honestly fucking typical any time Edgar isn’t the one reasoning with him. Jimmy sighs, shifts so he can see across the room better. The figure on the bed isn’t even looking at him, actually, just staring down at Tess, who—to her credit—is still fully unconscious. Those drugs must be something serious. As Jimmy watches, he reaches out towards her head, as if to touch her hair, and something burns in his gut. It’s not jealousy, he’s not stupid, he wasn’t lying, but Johnny watches _Edgar_. “Johnny,” he hisses, “leave her alone, man, get over here. What are you doing?”

No response. Johnny brushes a hand over some flyaway, and Tess twitches, grunts, rolls over. Jimmy, pissed and too tired to deal with this, grabs one of his discarded socks from the ground by the couch and chucks it at him. “Johnny,” he snaps, as quietly as he can manage. He can feel Edgar stirring next to him, but he’s too riled up to shush him back to sleep. The figure on the bed only turns to look at him in profile, peering coolly over one shoulder.

That’s not Johnny. He doesn’t know who that is.

Jimmy only freezes for a moment. Then he’s out of the blankets like a bottle rocket and stumbling to his feet, suddenly feeling incredibly thankful that he went to bed in jeans despite Edgar openly complaining about it. The Thing That Is Not Johnny barely turns its head, just keeping him in its peripheral vision. Even with eyes adjusted to the dark, Jimmy can’t see a single facial feature on it, no eyes, no mouth. It’s completely dark, like a hole cut out of existence in the shape of someone. “Who are you?” Jimmy asks, mouth completely dry. “How did you get in here?”

The Thing That Is Not Johnny gives him a placid, eyeless stare for a long moment. Then, it turns its head back to face Tess.

“Hey—“

 _Go away,_ a voice says from somewhere inside Jimmy’s head. It doesn’t sound like anyone. It’s not Jimmy’s voice, but it’s not anyone else’s, either. The Thing on the bed reaches towards his sister again.

Logic dictates that the best thing to do in this situation would be to wake Edgar up, to yell something, to get backup. But something cold and firm in the back of his mind tells Jimmy that waking anyone up is going to put them in danger. So instead, he leaps forward, hands out to grab that son of a bitch, drag it off his sister if he has to. He reaches out—

 

there is bl o od on your hands there is blood on your hands there is

it comes at him and he can see its eyes now, circling its head in a golden spiral, all darkness and eyes, eyes, he can hear in the bathroom the wings of the moth beating against the

 

 

didnt they turn that light off

 

Jimmy’s back hits the bathroom door, and he grabs the handle desperately, twists it, falls backwards into the room and against the sink. The Thing approaches him, deliberate and slow in its movements. It twists, its body reshaping, holds its arms out towards him. His hands scrabble on the sink until he finds something solid—a toothbrush, probably Edgar’s—and thrusts it forward into the mass of the beast—

 

the light above them explodes in a burst of color and fire in shredded glass and fire and the furious beat of wings an onslaught of them coming down at him from every direction and he can see that woman coming towards him

blood on her boots blood on her boots blood on the killing field, bullets in the _Vorüber! Ach, vorüber_ flesh of trees 

 

what did she  
why didnt she kiillll me what what she what was she waiting  
for whatisshewhatisshewhatisthatplace

its in the trunk i kept it in the trunk its in a little towel wrapped up in the trunk, good luck charm, she shut up for a single second i couldnt hear her screaming why cant she stop screaming, lots of people speak german SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP

and there will be a great cry throughout the land of Egypt, such as there never has been nor ever will be again—

there are so man y o fthem from ever, every every direction, and they swarm towards his head and he ? ? ? ? ? ? REDACTED REDACTED he throws his hands up on either side cover your ears cover your ears, dont let them crawl into your ears

jackboots on the ground, blood on her boots, he looks up and she is standing there eyes burning and boiling over green, pouring over her cheeks

 

jimmh

 

“Jimmy!”

The lights snap on and Edgar’s standing in the doorway, dark and real against the light. Jimmy gasps for air, grabs a fistful of his own hair and pulls—real pain, real, this is real—shaking and crouched on the ground. Edgar is at his side in a second, arms around him. “You’re okay,” he’s saying, “you’re okay, you’re okay…”

“What the fuck,” Jimmy gasps, voice ragged. His body aches, his back and face are damp with sweat, and he can’t get his breath back. “What was that, what the fuck just happened—“

“Jimmy?” Tess’ voice comes from beyond the door, and she stumbles into view, fighting oxycodone with noise and panic. “Oh my god, are you okay?”

“What was that,” he gasps, “that was the worst trip of my life and I didn’t even—I didn’t even do drugs, how did that happen, what—what was in that _beer,_ Tess, what did you order—“

“Fermented grain, what are you _talking_ —“ Tess starts, then halts suddenly. “Oh,” she says. “Oh, no, oh fuck.” She sits down on the edge of the bathtub.

“It’s okay,” Edgar is whispering, gentle platitudes like he’s trying to calm a terrified, volatile dragon in a kid’s movie about— _nope,_ Jimmy can’t even do _that_ right now. “You’re okay, it was just a nightmare.”

“No, it wasn’t,” Jimmy says, “I know because I _had_ a nightmare about a—a hallway, that doesn’t make it sound as fucked up as it was, it was super fucked up, and then I woke up and I saw something standing over _your bed,_ ” he adds, this time to Tess. “I thought it was Johnny, I—“

“Was there a locked door and a moth in the hallway?” She asks.

“I—what? I, uh,” Jimmy says, frowning. “I think—yeah, yeah, there was a door and I heard someone on the other side, why?”

What little blood was left drains from Tess’ face. “Oh my god,” she says, and covers her face with her hands. “I’m so sorry, this is my fault.”

“What are you _talking_ about?” For once in his life, the feeling of Edgar’s fingers working against the knot of muscles in his neck is not helping to calm him down at all. Jimmy feels fucking sick, sweaty and breathless, his stomach aching like a tooth. His sister is trembling.

“The thing you saw,” she says from behind her hands, “if I just gave it a host, this wouldn’t have happened—salted earth—I’m so sorry, Jimmy, I’m _so_ sorry…”

“Hey, hey,” Edgar says softly, “it’s okay, let’s just talk—“

“Tess, what _was_ that thing,” Jimmy says, staring her down hard. “You know what it was, right?”

She nods mutely, lowers her hands. “That was the worm,” she says, “it’s been living in my head all this time—taking my mind to pieces—and now it’s looking for a new host. I thought it was dead, I thought the car crash killed it, I thought—in the hospital—I’m so sorry,” she says, “I led you right to it. I never…”

She trails off. “Hey,” Jimmy says, “you don’t even know what I saw. It was like this—it wasn’t a worm, it was like a dude, and I grabbed him—or, I tried, I mean, I just—it was probably something in the drink, it was probably—I mean, we ate dinner at a place that sold drinks and handguns, I really shouldn’t have trusted it.”

“What did you see?” She asks. “When it touched you. What did you see?”

“I, uh, I,” Jimmy says, and shakes his head. It’s fading so quickly, it’s shifting away from him. “I—there was, there were moths,” he says, “thousands of them, swarming around the light. And there was, uh, there was a woman in, in combat boots or something—“

“Did you know her?” Tess says, voice tight. “Had you ever seen her before?”

“No, I—no,” he says, “I don’t know who she was, I barely got a good look at her.”

Her shoulders relax. “Okay,” she says, “okay. It’s still me. It hasn’t latched onto you yet.”

“What? What does that mean?”

“It _means,_ I know what to do,” Tess says, in a tone of voice that fills Jimmy with a surge of relief, “I can fix this. All we have to do is separate the lock from the key, okay? So tomorrow, when we head out for California, you guys leave me here.”

The relief is gone.

“Uh,” Edgar says, “come again?”

“I know, it sounds like a waste of time,” she says, nodding sadly, “especially since you guys spent all the money driving out to Nebraska to pick me up. And I’m sorry about that. I never would’ve called if I knew this thing was still alive. But if you ditch me, it’ll be like it never happened. I _promise._ I can give you a blank check, you can get whatever’s left out of my bank account to pay for the gas and stuff.”

“Tess, don’t be ridiculous,” Edgar says, “we’re not leaving you here. That’s crazy.”

She stares him down. When Jimmy looks at her arms, they’re shaking visibly. “You’re right,” she says after a moment, “that’s a terrible idea. There’s a town here.”

“What—“

“What you _should_ do,” she says, “is drive me out to a cornfield or something a couple miles off the highway. That way, I definitely won’t be able to make my way back on my own, and I’ll probably starve to death. No one gets hurt!”

“Uh, no,” Edgar says, “we’re not doing that.”

“I get it,” she says, “I get that you don’t understand. I wouldn’t believe it either. But my presence is putting everyone here at risk. You don’t know what that thing could do to you—to any of you. This thing took away two years of my life. I’m not letting it come for yours. You have to kill me.”

““Tess, stop it,” Edgar says, “what is this about? Really? I mean—“

“ _This is not a conflict resolution situation,_ Edgar,” she snaps, and gets to her feet. Her knees buckle in, but she manages to stay upright. “This is life and death shit, okay? I’m putting all of you in danger just by existing, and no amount of ‘ _I statements_ ’ is going to fix that! Just drop it!”

Jimmy, still sweating but feeling less panicky and more angry by the second, crawls out of Edgar’s grip and stands as well. He’s got more than half a foot on Tess—she never used to be this small, he’s sure of it—and he looms with every advantage he has. “Chill the fuck out,” he snarls, “he was just trying to—“

“And _you!_ ” She says, and turns on him, hands balled into fists. “You dumb motherfucker! Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? You walked _towards_ it? It could’ve turned your dumb stomach inside out!”

“I was _trying_ to protect _you,_ you—“

“I could handle it myself! You didn’t even wake him up!” She points at Edgar, who’s getting back to his feet and squinting blindly back. “You put both of you in danger! You could’ve—“

“Guys—“ Edgar tries, but Jimmy rolls right over him.

“Oh, really, because I need a lecture on safety from—“

“—Gotten everyone here killed! And where’s—“

“—Some crazy bitch who thinks she has some kind of supernatural—“

From the front door comes the sound of a key turning in the lock. Everyone shuts up immediately.

Johnny pokes his head through the door, a cherry freezie pinned between both of his hands. He stares at them. They stare back. “Hey,” he says after a moment, “why’s everyone in the bathroom?”

“Uh…”

“I could hear you fighting from all the way down the hall,” he says placidly, “I thought I would come see what’s wrong. Anything I can do?” He lifts the straw towards his mouth and takes a long, noisy sip.

“It’s nothing, Nny,” Tess says, “everything’s fine. I’m going to bed.”

She brushes past him and into the darkened hotel room beyond. Johnny turns his head to follow her trajectory, then turns back to stare, glossy-eyed, up at the two of them. “A very loud argument about nothing,” he says, “must have been debating the philosophy of Nietzsche vs. Sartre to get that kind of passion.”

Edgar stares at the doorway. “Well, that could’ve gone better,” he says weakly.

Jimmy stares at the dingy shower curtain. He can barely hear them over the rush of blood in his ears. “I’m going for a walk,” he snarls, “I can’t fall asleep anyway.” He can still see the rush of moths—the broken light—the fire above him. He’s not going back to bed. And he’s not sleeping in a room with his sister.

“Hey,” Edgar says, “don’t…don’t go far. Be back here as early as you can.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” he says, firmly. “We’re getting in the car and driving out of here as fast as we can. I don’t know what’s wrong with this city, but this would never happen in California. We’re going to be home tomorrow night, and that’s final.”

~~

What’s that thing they say? The best laid plans of, uh, well-intentioned dudes usually don’t work. Something like that. Long and short of it is that the car shits itself two hours from California and they stall out on a backroad between a cornfield and a forest. When Edgar pops the hood, he gets a face full of blue smoke, and lets out a stream of words Jimmy didn’t even realize he _knew._ Jimmy puts a hand on his lower back, which helps, sometimes.

“Okay,” Edgar says, running a hand up his face and pushing his glasses to the crest of his head, “we passed a gas station a while back, they’d have a phone. I could walk back, call triple-A…”

“Not on your own,” Jimmy says, and runs his thumb along his spine, “I could—someone’s going with you. Hell, we could all go, make a damn day of it.”

“Your sister’s not walking two miles down and back, not in that condition,” he replies, “she could stay here, but not by herself. Maybe Johnny could…” he trails off. Jimmy raises an eyebrow.

“You realizing what almost came out of your mouth?”

“Right, okay,” Edgar says. “So I’ll take Johnny with me, and you can stay here with Tess.”

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea.”

“I know,” he says, and adjusts his glasses, “but it’s the only one we have. Come on, it’s getting dark.”

Which is how Jimmy ends up sitting on the side of the road, watching his sister chuck rocks at nothing in particular. She keeps muttering to herself in words he can’t catch. The weight of their previous arguments hangs heavy in the air.

“Why’d you keep the ankh?” He asks at last. Tess startles.

“Huh?”

“The ankh,” he repeats, “your necklace. That’s the same one, isn’t it? That’s the one I gave you when I was a kid. Why’d you keep it?”

Her fingers run across the flat of it instinctually, like she doesn’t know she’s doing it. “The ankh,” she says slowly, “a symbol of protection, of life and death…safe passage from one to the other. It was lucky I had it when she caught me…it saved me.”

He remembers the ankh perfectly, actually. It was at one of those endless Christmas parties, one of his mother’s ‘let’s all get along’ family gatherings, what the fuck ever. He hadn’t meant to get anyone anything, really, not broke and fifteen. But he’d been fucking around in this silver crafts shop (looking at janky knives, if you really want to know), and the ankh had been right there, abandoned in a clearance bin. Discounted to an affordable price for damage or shoddy craftsmanship or something. An impulse decision. Piss mom off by buying one thing for one person he barely even knew, just another shithead teenage move. He always figured she was just humoring him, pretending to like it, swapping it out with the peacock broach on the chain she’d been wearing. He didn’t think she _kept_ it.

“What happened?” He asks.

Tess looks down at the rock in her hands. “I was on a bad date with a guy I didn’t like,” she says, voice souring, “she must have been there. I didn’t see her. Or maybe I did—it was all so long ago now, so—“ her face twists up.

Silently, Jimmy passes her a rock.

“One bad date, and now I’ve got a parasite,” she says, “what’s that remind you of? Ha, ha.” She aims at some unseen adversary, throws the rock as hard as she can. It bounces off the trunk of a tree. “I’m sorry I got you involved in this,” she adds. “You should really just leave me behind. It’s still attached to me, but if it jumped from her head to mine, it could target you, easy.”

“What are you talking about? Is this about the—the—the wormy thing?” _Jumped from her head to mine?_ “Anyway, we’re not leaving you, okay? You have to stop suggesting that, it’s super uncomfortable.”

Tess gives a put-upon sigh. “I wish I could make you understand,” she says.

“Then explain,” he says, and picks through the dust for another rock, “I’ll listen.”

There’s a rush of air as another car barrels past them, deaf to their voices and blaring something with a heavy bass. The birds in the cornfield across the road take flight in a rush of song. “Okay,” she says, “I’ll try. I don’t understand it too well, but I’ll try.”

Jimmy’s fingers find the perfect rock. He brushes the dirt off it with his other hand.

“The worm—I don’t know exactly what it is,” she admits, “I’ve been stumbling around in the dark, trying to figure it out. But here’s what I know—it’s a parasite that feeds on the mind. It’s the same one that was infecting Devi, and I think she got it when she moved into her house. It feeds on the faith you put into it. The more you indulge it, the stronger it gets, until it can take a host. Or build itself out of nothing.”

“A host?” He passes her the rock. “Like a haunted doll or something?”

“Yeah.”

“Weird.”

“I guess.” She rubs her thumb over it, aims, throws. “I let it get bad,” she says, “I let it grow because it flattered me. That’s what it does, that’s how it takes root. It appeals to your vanity. It says, ‘we can do anything’, it says, ‘you can have anything’, it wears other faces and tells you you’re beautiful. I let it in because it told me I was beautiful. I—“ she cuts herself off, hisses breath in through her teeth. She leans down and picks up a chunk of gravel for herself.

Jimmy says nothing.

“I mean, how pathetic can you get,” she grouses, more to herself than to him, “the shit I put up with, the shit I’ve always put up with, just for an off-chance to be—what? Valuable to someone? When I was in undergrad, I dated a jackass who kicked my shit in for eight months because he wanted to be a _photographer,_ because he told me I would make an interesting model. He didn’t even call me pretty.”

Jimmy says nothing.

“Social currency,” she mumbles, “running around, desperate for friends, for approval—trade one in for another, and what do you get? What did I get for it? A fucking crutch. All I ever wanted was to be something to someone. Anything to anyone. And it slithered in through my ear and lodged itself in my brain, and I let it because it wore their faces and told me it wanted me.”

Jimmy stares at the rock in his hand. “Whose faces?” He asks.

She looks up, stares across the way. “His,” she says. “And hers.” Her thumb rubs over the jagged edge of the stone. “She gave me an out,” she whispers. “She offered to let me go and I said no. I said no. I stayed down there with a boy who wouldn’t have thanked me if he’d survived, because I couldn’t go back unless it was as the _girlfriend_ of a boy in a _band._ ”

She hurls the missile in her hand in a vicious overhead swing, pelting a high branch and frightening a flock of various birds into flight. After a moment, her fingers run down the chain of her necklace.

“I’ll kill her,” Jimmy says.

“She was sick,” Tess says, running her fingers over the ankh, “like I was. Like I am.”

“That doesn’t justify shit,” Jimmy says, and kicks a rock, “you didn’t go around—“

“You don’t know what I did,” she snaps. “You don’t know anything about who I was before—you only remember what you want to remember. You don’t know what was in my head.”

Jimmy says nothing. He looks at the ground.

“I don’t see her anymore,” Tess says after a moment. Her voice is quieter than before, almost dreamier, like she’s floating somewhere deep in that dark water. “I used to see her. All the time, I was—I hated her, I thought I hated her. And then she—she was there, the real her, in my room with me.”

Jimmy doesn’t look up. “Your room?”

“In the hospital,” she says. “I don’t know how she found me, I—but she came. I was delirious, I think. Most of what I saw by then was shadows and mirrors, just faces worn by liars, but I knew she was real. She took me in her arms, she—“

Tess breaks off. When Jimmy looks up, she’s holding the ankh out, her arm extended. He can almost hear it— _a great cry throughout all_

“What did she do?” He says. “Tess, what did she do?”

Her head snaps towards him, eyes searching—and her face, a mask of terror and power, melts away into something softer. “Nothing bad,” she assures him. “She saved me. Set me free of the sickness. Sacrificed herself, maybe. I haven’t seen her since.” She pulls the ankh back towards her chest, and Jimmy thinks _a shield_. “I hated her,” she says, “I wanted to hate her. I hated her so much for so long. And now—now she’s gone, and what do I have left to show for it?”

In the trees, soft and distant, birdsong chirps back and forth. Quietly, Jimmy passes her another rock.

“I’m better now,” she says. “Being alone isn’t so bad.”

~~

Apparently the car is a one-night fix. The town triple A drives them to has exactly one hotel, one gas station, and the garage. A thriving night life scene, it is not. They debate the cost of sucking it up and buying a two-hour cab ride, but they’d still be stranded without the car, and _someone_ would have to go back. The two star establishment is still cheaper.

“The real question is food,” Edgar says as he digs through his suitcase. “I seriously doubt anything in the area is going to deliver.”

“There’s a gas station,” Tess replies listlessly, “it’s not exactly family dining, but they’ve probably got chips and beer or something. You guys should go load up.” She’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, her notebook posed jauntily in her lap. Jimmy eyes it with mistrust.

“You should come with us,” he says, “it’s not that far of a walk. Some fresh air and socialization, that’s what we all need. Maybe.”

“Aw,” she says, “I _would,_ except I don’t want to at all. You guys haven’t had a moment sans me since I hobbled into your car, I thought you’d be thrilled. I’m beat, I just want to jot down that today happened and crash. Grab me a peanut freezie or something.”

From the bathroom, Johnny yells something about whittling bar soap. “Why are they all so _small?_ ” He hollers.

“And you promise to stay here?” Edgar asks. Tess frowns.

“You think I’m gonna do a runner?” She replies. “Come on, man. If I was going to ditch you guys, wouldn’t I wait until we were back home, where I’ve got contacts? I’m crazy, not stupid.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jimmy says, and presses a hand over his heart, “I’ll stay with her.”

Tess startles. “What?”

“I just feel like we’re _connecting_ as _siblings,_ ” he continues, actively blind to the throat-cutting gestures his sister is making at him. “Plus, I’m pretty tired, and I haven’t watched a bad rerun movie on TV in three whole days. No joke, I might be dying.”

“I sympathize with your plight,” Tess says, “but I need some time alone.”

“Why?”

“So I…can…” Tess trails off and sits in silence for a solid thirty seconds. Jimmy knows, because he times the face journey of a lifetime that she goes on, a road trip on the theme of total confusion. “…Masturbate?” She settles on eventually, squinting uncertainly.

“Nope,” he says. “Johnny, you staying with us, or going with Edgar?”

Nny swans out of the bathroom with a veritable Babylonian tower of individually wrapped soaps. “You can’t send Edgar off alone,” he says, and dumps them all on the bed without comment. Because of course he does. “But if you two are staying here, you’ll need some sort of protection. Here.” He reaches under the covers of the bed and produces a thick, wooden baseball bat. Jimmy stares.

“When did you get that?”

“I brought it with us,” he says, and passes it into Jimmy’s unresisting hands. “I was keeping it in the glove compartment.”

“You were _not._ ”

“We won’t be gone long,” Edgar tells him, “but lock the door just in case, alright?”

Jimmy kind of expects a kiss, but he doesn’t get one from either of them as they head off again, which, rude. When he closes the door, Tess is glaring at him, arms crossed. “What the fuck,” she says flatly.

“That’s my line,” he says.

“You know, I always suspected you were real little brother material,” she says, “since you’re literally just doing this to _piss me off._ What’s your _damage?_ ”

“What, you can’t handle a little company? Come on, what’s really going on?”

“Maybe I _do_ have to jack off,” she snaps, “ever think of that? I apparently haven’t done it in two goddamn years—“

“Year and a half—“

“Oh, what _ever_ ,” she says, “goddammit, can’t I be left alone for one second? You three are smothering me. I don’t do the _constant companionship_ thing, okay?”

“You can’t be trusted to make your own decisions, Tess,” Jimmy yells, “The last time someone left you alone, you drove into the side of a _semi truck!_ ”

“Of course I did! That was on _purpose!_ ”

Jimmy shuts up.

“I thought, if I died, I could get rid of the worm,” she says, “I thought I could be done! But it’s not through with me yet! It won’t let me go, and I don’t know what to do about it, and now it’s fucking with you and _I can’t stop it._ It’s been hanging off my shoulder for days, getting louder, getting closer. It didn’t do so much while I was in the hospital, but it’s been circling—I keep seeing them on the horizon. It’s coming. And the closer you get to me, the worse it’s going to affect _you_ when it hits.”

“Why do you even care?”

“Because you’re my little _brother,_ you jackass,” she shouts, “I only called you because I thought this thing was gone, and it isn’t! I put you in danger, and I’m not going to let it hurt you! Or them! It’s _my_ problem, okay? _Me. I’m_ the issue.”

Jimmy looks down at her. His brain feels like it’s on fire, but he’s not angry. That’s weird. He can’t remember that ever happening before. “It’s just so hard to take you seriously when you’re so much shorter than me,” he says after a moment.

“Oh my _God,_ ” Tess says, and throws her hands up. She spins away from him, storms towards the hotel door. “This thing is _real,_ Jimmy. It could really hurt you. It hurts me all the time. I know you think I’m crazy, I know your boyfriend thinks this thing doesn’t exist, but it does, and it’s not going to show mercy to you just because it’s not in your head, okay?”

“Uh, two things,” he says, “one, how do you know Edgar’s my—“

“Seriously? _That’s_ number one?”

“We are _so subtle!_ ”

“You are _not,_ ” she says, “you literally sleep in a bed together and I saw him kiss you on the mouth once. Honestly, at this point, it’s weirder if you’re not dating, okay?”

“Damn, I really need to get my act together on that one,” he grumbles. “Okay, then, number two—“

Rats in the walls.

Jimmy looks up for the source of the noise at the same time that Tess does, peering through the half-dark of the poorly lit room. It’s somewhere above them, quiet and hard. Thousands of tiny little feet. It rushes in an arc, from one side of the room to the other, closer and closer as it reaches the zenith above their head and then fading fast as it passes, as though it were never there at all. He reaches down to catch the grip of Johnny’s bat in his hands.

“It’s coming,” she says, “you heard it, right?”

The bat is heavy in his hands. “You said this thing was real, right?” He asks. “It’s trying to make itself real?”

She hesitates, then nods. Her fingers catch on the hem of her turtleneck, and she pulls it up to reveal a grid of ugly red scars over her stomach and hips. “It’s not a figment,” she says.

The fire burns in his ears. “And it did that? It hurts you?”

She nods.

Jimmy swings the bat in his hands, tests the weight of it. “Then hurt it back,” he says.

Here’s the plan. The worm is still mostly attached to Tess at the moment, and it zeroes in on her whenever it can. Honestly, even last night in the last hotel, it only turned its attention on Jimmy because he called attention to himself like it was his fucking bar mitzvah and Leah, the coolest girl in the synagog, was chatting it up with that loser Micah, but he knew for a _fact_ that she would pay attention to him reading a passage from the Torah if he, for example, set something on fire beforehand. Is this metaphor getting out of hand? His parents were both some kind of Christian, he thinks. He’s never been to church, but, like, he’s _definitely_ never been to synagog.

Uh, weird mental tangent.

The point is, the worm is on the hunt, and it’s attracted to Tess’ brain right now. So all they really have to do is isolate Tess, let it come, and then…uh, beat the crap out of it.

“This isn’t going to work,” Tess says, but she crouches down by the side of the bed anyway.

“It _might_ work,” Jimmy says, “you’ve tried everything else, right?”

Tess grumbles and goes back to writing something in her journal. Jimmy steps backwards, almost into the bathroom, and keeps an eye on her. He sets the baseball bat on the ground next to him, just within reach if he needs it.

God, he’s really wishing he’d grabbed a beer before agreeing to do this. Every nerve in his body is pushing up against his skin.

Sure enough, the noise comes again—hoofbeats, this time, pounding away at the ceiling above them, loud and insistent. Jimmy follows the path with his eyes, across the room and towards the window, but it’s less a herd and more a highway, because the noise doesn’t fade this time. It sounds like fucking Ben Hur or something, yokes of horses smashing themselves into the sides of a racetrack, powering through on fear and sweaty horse adrenaline.

_”What are you doing here?”_

It’s a woman’s voice, right by his ear, and he jumps, spins around—but there’s no one in the bathroom behind him, not that he can see. And the second he squints around the back of the door, every light in the room snaps out.

He takes a step back and grabs the bat, heart pounding in his ears. With the diplomatic caution of a hostage who may or may not have a serial killer in the next room over, he shuts the door to the bathroom and turns to look at Tess.

There’s something standing over her.

It’s almost impossible to see, a shadow on shadows in the dark. But it moves on its own, shifts from one foot to the other. It almost looks human, back straight, upright on two legs.

His sister, crouched on the ground, doesn’t turn up to look at it. He’d assume she didn’t know it was there at all, except for the way her head tips to the side. She’s listening to something he can’t hear.

“No,” she says.

Jimmy tightens his grip on the bat.

“No,” Tess says again, but it’s weaker this time, less assertive. She dips her head down, like she’s trying to tuck herself away. “No, I don’t…don’t…”

She raises a hand to her head, like she’s trying to block an attack. The thing, the shadow—it twists down, its arms coming apart from the mass of darkness. It curls over her, reaches a delicate hand out towards the top of her head, almost to stroke her hair—

And Jimmy swings as hard as he can directly into its center.

He expects to blow right through it, send it swirling in clouds of mist or something, but he hits something _solid._ The contact races up his arms, jars him at the shoulders, and the shadow crashes backward, disappears into the darkness. A moment later, it’s gone.

All around them, the world explodes into that horrible cacophony. It’s so loud now. He covers one ear with the palm of his hand, but it’s like the stampede is inside his skull.

“Jimmy!” His sister shouts, scrambling to her feet, “what the fuck did you just do?”

“What the fuck,” Jimmy replies, breathless, “what the fuck was _that?_ ”

Tess makes an agonized noise. “That was the _worm,_ ” she shouts, “I told you, it’s been trying to form itself out of nothing. You need to get out of here, now, before you get hurt.”

“Okay, fuck off, I’m not leaving,” he says, “I’m not a monster, I’m not ditching you to deal with that thing _alone._ ”

She groans. “I’ve _always_ dealt with it alone,” she says, “I can handle it alone.”

“I know you can,” he says, “but you shouldn’t _have_ to.”

Tess stares at him, temporarily out of sarcastic shit to say. That, in and of itself, is way more disturbing than the racket they’ve been bellowing over. He’s just starting to feel like the sort of sap he normally thinks should be hung from the neck until dead for making porcelain baby angels or owning anything with ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ cross-stitched into it in their house, when Tess breaks out into a grin. “You just want to hit shit with a baseball bat, don’t you?” She asks. “Without Edgar yelling at you for it?”

He shrugs, grins back. The noise sounds louder than before, but it feels easier to hear over it than ever. He’s not sure if he should be worried about that or not. “What can I say,” he says, “violence without consequence should be my middle name.”

The noise cuts out.

Jimmy hefts the bat over his shoulder, turns to inspect the room. Does the quiet mean something’s coming? It was quiet before he hit the first one.

He turns to Tess to try and ask, but his jaw won’t open. Something’s holding it shut. When he reaches up to touch his face, his fingers come back with flecks of dried blood.

As he squints uncertainly at them, he’s aware of Tess motioning at him. It looks like she’s saying his name, but all he can hear when she opens her mouth is the buzz of swarming flies.

Something grabs him by the throat— 

_The lights click on. The hallway is long, longer the further down it you go, loud with the burn of florescent lights and quiet footsteps._

_Black jackboots—blood—_

_”What are you doing here?” says The Woman. He cannot see her eyes. Good. They would burn him._

_I’m—I—“_

_”I know who you are,” The Woman says, “what are you doing here?”_

His body jerks forward and hits the hotel carpeting. Above him, his sister screams like a banshee in heat and hurls her weight into something dark and formless. Jimmy’s hand scrambles for the bat—dropped it in the fall, or when he was grabbed—he swings into its mass— 

_The lights click_

The strike pours right through it. It’s not quite human, not quite, too many arms and too many eyes—the eyes, wet and black and rolling like marbles in its skull—

It crumples to the ground, palms against the floor like an insect. As Jimmy leaps to his feet, supporting himself against the wall, he hears the telltale sound of a butterfly knife being flipped open. Tess is holding it in her left hand, a nice piece in black and silver. He didn’t know she had a knife with her the whole time. Maybe he can get her to show it to him later.

The shadow shifts. It doesn’t so much _move_ , at least not the way a living creature would. It compresses in on itself, its features losing what little definition they had, changing its basic shape. The darkness funnels upwards, until it towers upright, sprouting a new head from the abyss.

Tess stares up at it, her face contorting in fury. “Get the fuck out of my head, you piece of shit,” she hisses, and slashes it across the torso.

It screams, filling Jimmy’s head from the inside out. His throat fills with something wriggling and alive as he bites through the crust of blood cementing his mouth in place. “Tess,” he manages, “catch!”

He chucks the bat toward her with an overhead swing, sending it into an artful spin, arcing over the shadow and hitting his sister smack in the center of her outstretched palm. She grips it, swings it experimentally at her side, rests it against the floor. There’s a streak of something endlessly black on her cheek. Instinctively, Jimmy knows it’s blood.

The screaming quiets, changes pitch. What once was shrill is now a low, horrible grinding noise. _Rats, there’s rats in the walls…that’s impossible, I would have heard it…_ Tess swings the bat towards it, but it’s on-guard now. It dodges backwards.

And Jimmy lunges forward to catch it in his arms.

If he thought the screaming was bad before, it’s unbearable now. The raw agony of its onslaught is almost enough to make him drop the beast in his arms just to get a second of relief. But he holds on, keeps a tenuous grip on the slippery thing, bites down on a wail of pain. It thrashes in his grip, shrieking, shifting from one shape to another, writhing and scratching at his arms. He stumbles back—hits the wall—but doesn’t let go.

“Tess!” He hollers. “Hit it! Kill it!”

She raises the knife and steps forward—then lowers it. “Wait,” she says, “you’re behind it. What if I hit you?”

_The lights click on. The hallway is long,_

“I’ve taken worse,” he yells, “just kill it! Get this fuckin’ thing off me!”

_longer the further down it you go, loud with the_

Tess opens her mouth like she’s going to protest, then closes it. She raises the knife uncertainly in her hand. Pauses. Then, “okay, I got it,” she says, “hold still.”

“What?” Jimmy says. “What are you talking—“

She jams the knife into the creature’s side. One, two, rapid fire into the closest thing to flesh it’s got. Strong strikes, still pointed away from Jimmy’s relatively fragile human skin. It screams—screams—screams—

_burn of florescent lights and quiet_

Tess is screaming, wild and animal, black opal blood streaking her face like war paint, and 

_bloodstained floorboards, the woman in jackboots is lying in the center of it—“please don’t kill me,” she says in a voice that has never belonged to her, “I need to live…the masterpiece, my magnum opus, I have to finish—“_

“Fuck you!” Tess is screaming. She grabs the thing by the arm, and together, the two of them drag it to the ground. “Jimmy, hold her down!”

“It’s her?” He asks, and feels the blood rush through him fresh all over again. He’s been wanting to kill this bitch for as long as he’s known her name. It might just be a shade, but it’s close enough to the real thing for him.

_”I have to finish—“_

“Shut up!” Tess shrieks. The knife hits the carpet, forgotten, as she takes the bat in both hands like a broadsword of old. In her, he can almost see the haze of Johnny’s madness—the white linen, the golden wings, a blood-spattered and righteous crusader—

And she brings it down with both hands into the center of its flesh. It shrieks, nails on a chalkboard, and she pulls back. “Fuck—“ she heaves, and strikes down again, “—you! Fuck you! Fuck you!”

She strikes it again and again, beats it through it’s shrieking, beats it until it can only whimper, mangles it with the force of her hatred. Jimmy watches, holds the bitch in place until even its weakest cries fall away into silence, until it can’t even twitch. She keeps hitting it.

As the blows finally begin to slow and Tess starts to gasp for breath, Jimmy looks up at her and grins. “Now _that_ ,” he says, “was some prime quality murder.”

Tess drops the bat, presses a hand into the body to help her catch her breath—then immediately jerks back with a yelp. A thick web of goop follows her hand like some kind of goth, knockoff Slimer nastiness, a trail from the body to her unwillingly participating limb. “Oh, _gross,_ ” she pants, “what is _that?_ ”

Jimmy reaches out to touch it, but recoils when he catches sight of his own hands. Where he’d been holding the thing by its shoulders (er…shoulders?), his palms are overflowing with identical toxic waste. “Uh,” he says, “cool?”

As one, they look down at the shadow, just in time to watch it melt into the carpet like a gumdrop in the sun. Where the low hotel mood clicks back on, it shines like an oil slick.

“Is that what it looked like to you?” Tess asks, gasping. “Oh, Christ, I haven’t felt this tired in—in, uh, in…” she pauses. “Since before…before I got grabbed,” she says. “Jimmy, I think—I think it’s gone.”

“Yeah?” Jimmy says.

“Oh my god,” she groans, “I can’t believe this. That _worked?_ We just hit it with a baseball bat a couple times. That was _it?_ That was all I had to do? Why didn’t I think of that? Am I retarded? I don’t remember being retarded.”

“So just to clarify,” Jimmy says, “you think my idea was genius, and I’m the one who fixed this?”

“I’m so fucking tired,” she says, “everything is so sore. And I’m hungry. How am I so hungry? Oh my god, I’m so out of breath, I’m—my stomach hurts so much, I’m gonna fucking hurl. Am I dying?”

“Right, I’m a genius,” Jimmy says, and passes his sister the trash can next to him. “Is this thing going to evaporate? How do we get melted crazy out of the carpet? You think Windex is good for rug stains?”

“Windex is for glass,” Tess says, and promptly vomits into the can.

~~

Tess drinks a cup of water and eats half of the granola bar that Jimmy remembered Edgar packed in his suitcase for emergencies, then passes out on top of the still-made bed. She looks a little grey in the face (probably from all the vomiting), but despite looking sicker, she kind of looks…better. Jimmy takes a pair of bobby pins and breaks into the cleaning service’s closet to get some rags and, uh, windex? All-purpose cleaner.

He’s on his knees, using a steel brush to tug clumps of rapidly drying nightmare goop out of shag when Johnny and Edgar get back, cheap convenience store plastic bags in hand. “Oh my god,” Edgar says, when he sees the gunk, “we were gone for _forty-five minutes,_ how did you even…what _is_ that?”

“Uh,” Jimmy says, sitting back on his knees and staring at the spot. He’s not making a lot of progress. “It’s…the worm.”

“The…what?”

“Honestly, I have no idea,” Jimmy says, “it’s the thing that attacked me last night. Apparently it’s been squatting in Tess’ head for a while, so we, uh…pulled it loose and, uh, murdered it, I guess. I don’t think it was really alive?”

“That thing is _real?_ ” Edgar manages. He stares down at it, terror and disbelief battling it out like a fucking civil war over the greatest land ever claimed: the high ground of The Nose.

Behind him, Johnny looks down at the spot on the ground, over to Tess, exhausted and unconscious, then back at the spot. Without saying a word, he drops the bags hooked onto his arms all over the ground, steps over the small pile towards her bed, and scoops her into a deeply uncharacteristic hug. Jimmy doesn’t even pretend not to gawk.

Tess stirs, groans in pain. “Hey, buddy,” Jimmy can just make out (what? She’s grumbling into his shoulder, it’s not like he’s in easy earshot here), “what’s up?”

Johnny mumbles something incomprehensible.

“Yeah, yeah,” she says, “Jimmy helped. I’ll take a rain check on the hug thing right now, my arms don’t work right.”

Johnny settles her back down and turns to face them as Jimmy gets to his feet. “Uh, yeah,” Jimmy says nervously, “hey. We, uh…team effort. Team—“

He cuts himself off with a little gasp of air as Johnny steps back across the room and wraps him in a pair of skinny little arms. It feels like getting strangled by an octopus. It’s heart-stopping. As he debates where to put his own arms, to avoid making him uncomfortable, he realizes that the skin of Nny’s cheek is pressed against the bare flesh of his neck. His hands settle just over the hooks of his shoulder blades. Okay. Okay.

Quietly, Edgar slips past them towards Tess, muttering quietly. “Are you alright? What happened, what hurts?”

“No, it’s just my—uh, my arms, and my torso,” she says, “and I have a migraine, and, uh, everything. Everything hurts.”

“When’s the last time you took your painkillers?”

“This morning. Maybe twelve hours?”

As Johnny pulls away, the buckles of his apparatus catching on the worn-soft fabric of Jimmy’s shirt, Jimmy sees Edgar at Tess’ elbow, helping her sit upright and searching through the detritus on the bedside table to find her painkillers. “Ugh,” she says, “thanks. Sorry for being a crazy bitch for like, three days.”

“You’ve been under a lot of stress,” he says calmly, “here, take these.”

“Ghh,” she replies. “Why are we even here? Let’s just go home already.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says, and smiles, “let’s go home.”

“After you clean all that shit off the carpet,” Edgar says, a lot less gently when it’s directed at him, so, okay, noted, “also, the car is still broken until tomorrow.”

“Oh yeah, I forgot about that.” He looks down at the rag. His skin is hot where Johnny touched it, but not in a, like, burned way? Just sort of a full-on Japanimation girl blush. His neck is probably luminescent. “Honestly not sure I’m going to be able to clean this out.”

“I’ll help,” Johnny says, “for fifteen minutes. Then I have to go talk to a bird I saw on the sidewalk. He said some very rude things about Kafka’s early work, and someone needs to educate him.”

“Okay,” Jimmy says. “Okay.”

The color doesn’t all come out of the shag, but they get most of the crusty goop out of the fibers. They eat. Jimmy talks, Edgar listens.

And the next day, they call the garage, and they drive home.


End file.
